Arcanaville

In my experience 45ish defense plus whatever lucks randomly drop are good enough for both trials most of the time. Where it tends to fall apart is when you're the lone target of a lot of psionic attacks, many of which won't be positional. Like if you decide to solo a crate or containment tube.

Otherwise, you won't be indestructible, but to be honest in the trials nothing is. If you get to the point that 9CUs have so much defiance they are shredding your defense, they will probably also be shredding everyone else.

As it turns out, it just might.

The system doesn't have to be repetitive. It just isn't designed to recycle older content (except for the shard-bridge from standard to end game content). If the devs could have released I20 with fifty Incarnate trials, that would have been fantastic and no one would have to repeat anything. But they just can't generate content that fast.

Although I should mention, however, that there is actually a technical reason for the system being at least *somewhat* repetitive. For raids to work, there has to be enough participation to create critical density of players wanting to do the content. So actually, if I20 released with fifty trials, we couldn't actually be doing fifty different trials because there's not enough players to do that. Instead leagues would form that would do a bunch in sequence, from one to the next. If you logged in and joined a team in the middle of such a progress, you would have little choice or opportunity in doing something other than what that team was running along doing. That diffuses the players across a lot of content, creating other problems.

*Some* minimum amount of player-density is required for the end game. And while it probably could have been lower with four trials, or maybe even six, at some point the players would have been spread too thinly. And when you concentrate the players into a smaller amount of content, you will always create some theoretical repetitiveness.

Its actually the reason we don't just keep increasing the level cap. Among other reasons, more levels scatters the players across larger combat level ranges. You actually need a certain number of players to have a certain amount of levels, because the number of high level characters has to exceed a certain amount. Part of the technical reason why CoX end game is what it is, is because the devs have the challenge of adding higher "levels" to the game while still keeping everyone close to level 50 combat performance in at least some sense. We don't have the twelve million players it takes to have an 85 level cap. And even Blizzard was judicious in adding more levels. They have over a hundred times our playerbase and only 70% more levels.

You went full Incarnate, man. Never go full Incarnate.

We're extremely likely to get more of the same. I don't think we're likely to get just more of the same, although the tendency will likely be for high-end end game content to be teamed, as it has always been in the past with trials, task forces, and zone events.

More sophisticated content will also filter down to lower levels: things like the two new task/strike forces for example. And as they add more trials there will be more opportunities to do different things to unlock the same slots and the higher slots. But fundamentally, level 41 through 50 was the same as level 31 through 40, but with different critters. If you didn't like 31-40, 41-50 was going to be more of the same. Interface through Lore is not going to be identical to the rest of the slots up through Omega, but on the other hand if you don't like the end game so far, I'm not the one to blow sunshine up your skirt and say the other slots will suddenly become magically totally different, because I don't believe that to be a true statement.

If you like and prefer the standard game, its still there and will still be added to, just like they still add level 20 content and level 40 content. They will still add level 50 content that is not an incarnate trial periodically. But level 50 has to share time and resources with the incarnate system now.

To be fair, its six runs each of two different trials. And "the most basic set of boosts" in the Incarnate system are not trivial. Its not like the difference between SOs and purple sets. Its more like the difference between set IOs and purple sets.

Even six runs each might be too much for you, but I didn't say 12 runs would be acceptable to everyone. I said it wasn't a large number of runs to expect players to run to unlock all four slots *and* slot common powers in all four slots. Its only 50% higher than the absolute minimal floor of eight runs to perform the eight tasks of unlocking four slots and slotting four common powers. Below that level would be objectively degenerate game design, which is another way of saying objectively stupid without margin for subjective interpretation. 50% higher than the level of effort which would make the devs provably idiots is about as low as you can comfortably go as a game designer.


Alpha was intended to be a bridge to the new end game, which is why you can make progress in it with any level 50 content. But the new end game was going to be different than all the other level 50 content. If all the devs wanted to do was to make more rewards for players to earn while playing *any* of the end game content, there would be no need for a new end game system. The moment the devs said they were working on a new end game system, the one thing that everyone was supposed to be absolutely certain of was that it wasn't going to be indistinguishable from the current level 50 content, which is not really an end game system so much as it is the highest level standard content that happens to exist.

Understand this: if you don't like or want an end game system, that's a personal preference choice, and that's fine. But if you are saying you wouldn't mind the end game system if it would allow you to play the standard level 50 content and still make the same progress, you're actually asking for something that is contradictory on a fundamental design level with the notion of actually adding a distinct end game system. The end game system you want, we already had, and still have, which was just more of the same. The current end game system is for players who wanted more than just more of the same.

Actually, the figures I quoted above are that I am getting on average about 16% of Judgment per BAF, and for calculation purposes only assumed 13.3% per BAF, which is right in line with your experiences. I'm assuming you keep all your drops whatever they are, hoard any Empyreans you get, and break down all Astrals to get those progress figures. 4 threads and 3 astrals is 16 threads which can convert into 50k * 16 = 800k iXP. Assuming you get even 8% of Judgment from a really bad BAF, that is still 120k, for a total of 920k iXP, or 61% of Judgment in one run.

What some people aren't fully realizing, and even I did not fully appreciate this fact at the start, is that Astrals are the #1 source of threads from every trial run. You are getting between a dozen and twenty threads just from Astrals, and they fall fast. Astrals all by themselves can unlock Judgment in two good BAF runs with no help from thread drops and direct iXP. When Lore unlocked on my main I decided to immediately craft a rare pet. I had a rare drop and untold uncommons, but no commons and only a few threads left. I basically created all seven commons using astrals all at once. I burned 35 astrals in one buying spree, and still had dozens left over.

1. You do not need any special character or build to participate. Even an SO-slotted concept build can contribute sufficiently meaningfully to gain typical rewards.

2. The trials have no special preparatory requirements or recommended steps prior to execution, beyond amassing the appropriate number of players (like, say, collecting EoEs prior to a Hamidon raid).

3. The trials do not require specific player skills beyond what the rest of the game generally requires.

4. The trials do not require special out-of-game coordination, such as voice chat, to complete successfully.

5. The trials do not require substantial practice to complete successfully.

6. Failure grants a substantial percentage of the total possible average rewards.

7. The Incarnate power and slot rewards ultimately associated with the trials have entry-level variants that are a substantial percentage of the maximum possible reward and can be acquired in relatively trivial amounts of time relative to leveling time.


As a matter of fact, I've been analyzing the reward system itself to gain some insight into the participation algorithm, so that's something I've already done.

Eliminating things like Master runs and such, I'm averaging well over 350k iXP per Lambda, and over 200k iXP per BAF (i.e. the numbers are closer to 440k and 240k respectively). Those averages or better hold for all the runs I've done on an energy blaster, a single target focused MA scrapper, and an Illusion controller, so I believe they are likely to be reasonable average statistics. Assuming four threads and three astrals per run and 50k iXP per thread conversion and no component breakdown, the average number of trial runs necessary to unlock the four slots at those numbers would be:

Judgment: 1.5 BAFs
Interface: 1.3 Lambdas
Lore: 2.3 BAFs
Destiny: 2.0 Lambdas

Total: ~ 4 BAFs and 4 Lambdas.

In other words, four pairs of runs unlocks all four slots. And how long to get at least a common power slotted in all four? Assuming your average drop is a common drop, each run nets the equivalent of 36 threads per run. It takes 60 thread-equivalents to slot a common power, so four takes 240 threads which is 7 runs. But your first eight to unlock generated eight common components (since I didn't count breaking them down) so actually you only need 120 thread equivalents or about 4 more runs.

That's a total of 12 runs to unlock four slots and slot four common powers, averaging three trial runs per slot. The worst case scenario is you get uncommon drops on every run which are only worth nine threads on average via breakdown, in which case it would take about three more runs total.


Whatever other problems the trials have, being "hardcore" isn't one of them. The are somewhat more complex than the standard content in terms of the task requirements per trial for successful completion, but only because the vast majority of standard content has zero gameplay requirement complexity beyond finding your way to the mission objectives. Casual != Solo. The fact that the trials are teamed content does not automatically make them hardcore. 12 is not a big number. The fact that some players want to do all twelve in one sitting does not make the system itself hardcore. A player who does two on saturday and two on sunday and spends the rest of the week doing something else or nothing else entirely would be 2/3rds of the way done with slotting commons in all four slots of a character. In terms of *speed* of progress you really cannot ask for anything better than that. Or rather, you can ask, but you won't get. It is actually too casual to function as an end game system for any MMO except probably this one.


Now, if someone wants Very Rares slotted in all four slots in multiple characters then its not the system that is hardcore, they are.

Behind? No, definitely not behind. Way, way, way out in front of maybe.

My number reads "01". I was saying for months that the devs would be crazy to add rewards to a player-authored mission editing system, before the devs announced they were adding rewards to a player-authored mission editing system and proved that neither of us was as smart as anyone thought I or the devs actually were.

But if the person I was responding to was willing to count that, then there has been solo story arc content added in every issue, including every week since I18 released.

First of all, confirmation bias presumes I had an initial bias to confirm. In fact, I had no idea what the data was going to say, and in fact if you read my post you'll see that I threw time in there almost as an after-thought: I assumed influence would show the stronger signal.

Second, its highly unlikely that pure time spent in the trial would be the direct determinant in your reward table, so I specifically discounted that possibility in my post. The most likely possibility is that the longer trials were also different in some way that was the true determining factor, and I said so. Concluding I implied anything different contradicts the actual text of my post.


Although skepticism is healthy, if my back of the envelope calculation is correct, the odds that that distribution is the product of random chance is two thousand six hundred forty to one. And I'm not one to overplay a statistical anomaly. Historically speaking, I've only been wrong once in detecting or failing to detect a statistical anomaly, out of over a hundred such assertions, and the one turned out to be an error in the way I collected the data, which I now have specific procedures for avoiding in public posts. It hasn't happened again in the last five years.


Objectively, that's true because there is no statistically significant signal in BAF. However, I believe the BAF data is also non-random, but that's an intuitive judgment based on decades of experience analyzing data. I don't expect anyone to trust my intuition when it comes to this sort of thing, but I do and that intuition has led me to discover a lot of problems that would eventually take a lot of statistical analysis to uncover.

The Lambda signal is unambiguous. The BAF data is only meaningful if you trust my past credibility detecting problems, which I'm not asking anyone to do.

And I should mention that just the unordered distribution of drops is statistically significant. Three common drops out of 21 runs is unusual if common drops were intended to actually be common and randomly awarded. Three rare and five uncommon out of eight BAF runs is itself highly suspicious albeit not conclusive. Taking all these observations together leads me to conclude there's enough evidence to assert the drop tables are not completely random.

Everyone keeps saying that AoE is king in the trials. Shouldn't your most effective attack be Whirling Hands, not Energy Transfer?

In any case, my MA/SR scrapper can get decent use out of Eagle's Claw in the trials, and while its cast time is not as long as Total Focus, its comparable to Energy Transfer. I find it difficult to believe I can use EC effectively most of the time, if ET and TF are ineffective most of the time.

Not even the fastest teams I've been on are vaporizing the bosses in the trials instantly, so my scrapper targets them specifically. My attacks land on live targets most of the time. And there are large sections of the trials when the league is not concentrated enough to defeat targets fast enough for this to be a problem either way in my experience: fighting the AVs or the escape phase in BAF, gathering weapons in Lambda, fighting Maurader in Lambda. I even consistently land EC on the turrets in Lambda, because they never go down instantly.

I have a partial solution to the problem, but I honestly haven't had an opportunity to discuss it with the devs. I was thinking about it when thinking about how to fix negative stealth. Which I think I might know how to do also.

That's not really the issue. The issue is that because we *always* get to choose which common, which uncommon, and which rare components we get, the number of different kinds of commons is irrelevant unless you accidentally pick one you later can't use. In other words, you can make mistakes, but except for mistakes the system would present the exact same costs to every player even if there was only one of each. That's not true with the invention system because we get random drops during missions. We could use them, or we could sell or trade them. We don't get to decide what are drops are, so the different kinds have meaning.

In the current Incarnate system, they have no meaning except to offer more possible ways to choose the wrong thing. That would be acceptable if it was there for flavor, but flavor should be transparent to the players. Players should have some idea that if they are going to construct a psionic pet, they should probably get the psionic rare component. Otherwise the extra detail is not serving a useful gameplay purpose.

Part of the problem is that errors can be immensely costly. If you get a Hamidon Goo drop but you really need Pangean Soil, you sell the Goo and buy the Soil. No one bemoans getting "the wrong" rare drop in the invention system because stuff can be bought and sold, and more importantly there is usually not radically dissimilar costs for comparable items. You can only convert and breakdown Incarnate components in your own inventory, and the asymmetry between creation and breakdown is very high. It costs 60 threads to make an uncommon. It breaks down into only 9 on average. If you pick an uncommon from a drop table and then later decide to make something that uses a different uncommon, your error just cost you 51 threads. Almost the entire cost of the uncommon in the first place. If you pick the wrong rare, you've screwed yourself to the tune of over 300 threads. The difference between having the wrong rare and having no rare at all is almost nothing.

Perhaps one way to partially remedy this is to offer "transmutation" recipes. Keep the breakdown values the same: if you really want to break a component down into the lowest form of incarnate currency, you're not going to get much. But suppose you could turn any uncommon into any other uncommon at the cost of that uncommon and, say, 6 threads. Suppose you could turn any rare into any other rare for the cost of that rare and maybe 30 threads. Something like around ten percent of the cost of construction. That's not bad, and it means if you want to think ahead and figure it all out ahead of time, you'll do a little better than someone that just picks randomly. But even if you pick randomly, you'll still get about 90% of the value out of those components even if you later have to transmute them into other flavors. The flavor then becomes just that: mostly flavor.

There are a lot of side effects to doing that which I doubt everyone would approve of.

Only to the extent that the entire game is a farming system for XP and rewards, just with different skins.


Over my dead body.

Technically speaking, your holds "affect" the AV whether they are actually mezzed by you or not as far as the game engine is concerned, because you have incremented their mez attribute. My guess is that the devs probably haven't added a monitor to check to see if you actually mezzed the target, because that would be complicated (if I hit a boss with a hold and then you do, do you get credit for the mez and I get none - that sort of question is the kind of question I would not want to delve into if I were the devs).

On the other hand, I will say that sometimes the devs take an expedient path that they feel is "good enough" even if it has significant problematic corner cases, that I wouldn't take. So I cannot really say what is the most likely algorithm for the participation algorithm if it exists (I assume it does, but I cannot prove with 100% certainty that it does).

Its clear to you, and if you wish to quit on that basis, that's your prerogative. Just like it was clear after I9 that this game was going to focus on nothing but gear, just like it was clear after I18 that this game was going to focus on nothing but Praetoria, just like after I11 it was clear the devs didn't want to make any new content anymore and was just throwing Ourorboros at us to package up old content as new content.

Of course, I'm wondering how you managed to survive the four issue and 17 month gap between Issue 13 and Issue 17 when there was also no solo story arc content added to the game.


Perhaps its just been a long week, but I'm beginning to find these comments increasingly objectionable. I'm sorry you don't like the content in I20. I'm sorry you've decided to leave as a result. I'm not going to tell you good riddance like some might. I will say that Paragon is not interested at keeping the "hardcore" players at "the expense" of the "casual" players. They have decided to make an endgame that seems to be so successful at drawing people's attention that there are people complaining it has temporarily decimated teaming outside of them on some servers. If the vast majority, or even a large sizable minority of players were choosing to completely ignore I20 and continue playing the other content, it would be the trials empty and the other content full.

In other words, they have decided to add something to the game that you don't like, and you could choose to ignore but choose not to. It happens. One day, it may happen to me, although my tolerant gameplay choices make it probably much less likely. Its not personal, and its not deliberately targeted at you, and its not specifically choosing one group of players over another. Its making an addition to the game that not everyone will like, just like all other additions to the game that not everyone ended up liking. I don't specifically enjoy the thought of losing anyone as a player, but neither would I sacrifice the end game to keep you, just like I wouldn't sacrifice the invention system to keep the players we lost to it, or Going Rogue itself to the players we lost to that.

I'm not going to ask you to stay. I'm not going to ask you to leave. You should do what you think makes the most sense to you, and there comes a point in most gamers lives when they decide to move on from a game. But if you're moving on because you think Paragon Studios is "abandoning" non-Incarnate content or solo players or casual players or whatever else, I'm saying you're leaving because of a false conclusion. But that is still your choice to make.

You should have seen what we were telling people about MA back in the day. Consider that of your first three attacks, one used to lock you into a four second animation (Storm Kick), and one had almost no damage (Cobra Strike) we used to tell people that eventually, it got less bad.

Less bad was an attack that knocked things out of melee range, an attack that knocked many things out of melee range, a melee ranged minion immobilizer that said it slowed recharge and lied about it, and the worst tier 9 attack ever in the history of the game, even if you include Frozen Aura in there.

For all the problems MA currently has, the people playing it today are playing a joy of a set by comparison to what it used to be.

Actually, complexity is specifically what you want in a system you are attempting to fortify against min/maxing: a complex system won't have a single or small set of local minima and maxima, making such activities sufficiently subjective so as to radically reduce the advantage of doing them.

That has nothing to do with this subject, because this isn't a question of system complexity, but presentation complexity. Presentation complexity is supposed to be as simple as possible given the system requirements. I don't think the Incarnate one is all that bad, but its probably not optimal.


Here's the difference between the two. Suppose I offer you a choice: one power that granted you 8% resistance to all but toxic and psi, or a power that granted you the sliding resistance from one SR passive: from 60% health to zero the power would increase in resistance to those types from 0 to 20%. You get to pick one.

That's a simple presentation of a very complex choice. Any player can look at that choice, understand what the choice is saying, and decide. But good luck min/maxing it. That's *exactly* what you want in a powers system where you want people to make intuitive choices without being dictated to by calculators, but without penalizing them too badly for not calculating. The qualitative choice in the above situation is probably going to be no better or worse of an approach on average than 99.99% of all the players attempting to pick a calculated choice.


The complexity should not be in the choices themselves, but what those choices do. In that, I think the Incarnate crafting system is not ideal. Suppose you're leaning towards making Judgment instead of Interface, or Cores instead of Radials. It would have been nice if all Cores required Cantrips and all Radials required Detailed Reports, say, because then the components mean something. Plus, the physical slots are Interface and Destiny and the psychic slots are Judgment and Lore. So why do we have magical components? Shouldn't we have physical and psychic salvage, even if we're given the choice of both in either trial?

The problem is the "flavor" obfuscates, rather than articulates what the system does. It could have been given a better presentation while still keeping all of the flavor if the salvage had just been broken down into the same categories the powers are: Physical or Psychic, Total or Partial, Core or Radial.

I can imagine a system where crafting a common physical power required three common physical components, crafting an uncommon physical core power required two physical common components and one uncommon core component, a rare physical total core required the uncommon power plus a common physical component plus a common physical core component plus a rare total component, etc. Then you just give these things evocative names matching their type. The common physical component could be "Supercharged Capacitor." But the uncommon physical core component might be "Antimatter containment vessel" and the uncommon physical radial component might be "Quantum transponder" - something that would at least evoke "core" and "radial" in some way so people could get their handle around them intuitively. I'm sure there are better labels than that, but that's just intended to be an example.


But then again: I'm a dreamer about this stuff. I would have made "Core" do one thing really strong and "Radial" do lots of things weaker, and it looks like they were thinking that originally, but it didn't quite turn out that way. And "total" and "partial" don't make sense any way you look at it. How about "Focused" and "Sustained" which would imply the power was either frontloaded or lasted longer?

It really feels like the names were made up first before any notion of what the powers were supposed to do, and then the powers were made to fit the names to some degree. That kinda drives me crazy.

Benefit from what?

You're entitled to feel that way, just like all the people who felt the invention system turned this game into a crappy wow clone, and all the people who felt the mothership raids turned this game into a crappy wow clone, and all the people who felt that the LRSF turned this game into a crappy wow clone. I'll bet there were a few people who said that when WoW added their version of exemplar, it just turned WoW in to a crappy City of Heroes clone (a very, very, very few). Everyone's entitled to their perspective, but to me this sounds like someone saying that converting an F22 to run on biofuel turns it into just another crappy Geo Metro clone.

I've taken occasional breaks from the game myself. Perhaps you need one. If you don't like running something but you feel compelled to do so, that's probably the best time to step back for a while. If you like the game, you'll come back. I always do.

I also strongly stated my opinion that Willpower was far more powerful than virtually anyone was giving credit for. I was actually amazed it was buffed on release. I blame Starsman, although that's another story.

Well why didn't you say so in the first place? Of course MA wins there: that's *its* one real trick:


YOU DON'T SERIOUSLY THINK I'M AFRAID OF YOUR LITTLE...


HOLY &^*! WHERE'D MY BRAIN FLY OFF TO!?!