Aura_Familia

Originally Posted by MisterD

I was talking about this with a friend.

Maybe if we had some way to 'test' Incarnate powers, before locking them in, as it were. This would really help reduce the grindy feeling, especially for those people who DONT make everything, just cause they only play a few toons.

I was thinking..let us craft an On Loan power, say between 5-30 mins use, and make us unable to join a team/league/pvp in that period. This would give you a chance to play around with the power and see if it suits you.

Some of the slots, Judgement mostly, is pretty darn obvious. You know it is gonna be a bigass nuke and all the same (base) damage. And they are very easy to 'see' others using. But ones like interface, destiny, and now hybrid, are much harder to get a feel for.

Obviously some people will cry..But that is why we have the Test server! To which I say..so what. Downloading test, updating test, logging onto test, finding enough trials going there (good luck after a new issue) is hardly realistic.

Oh and also..given how much hoohaa was made when we got this 'real numbers' put into the game (detailed power info etc) can you devs PLEASE make sure that new powers actually have their info?? A heap of the hybrid options have nothing under detailed and again..without making the power, there is no way to see.

Originally Posted by EnigmaBlack

I would almost agree with the ITF, prefect level range, challenging enemies, good story line, however I think it falls short of being some of the "greatest CoH content ever created" for the simple fact that you need to unlock the zone, which is IMO is one of the worst designs in CoH ever.

Personally I love the farms. I completed the trial once successfully, that's all I care for. Heck I can run a BaF or Keyes in half the time and get more Astrals, Emps and if it's Keyes, have a better chance on the component reward table.

Originally Posted by Codewalker

There's a UI team?

Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect

Okay, give me an example of WELL designed content.

It's a safe bet that for every example you come up with, several people will disagree with you.

It is IMPOSSIBLE for the devs to design content that is viewed as well-designed and fun by 100% of the players. It can't be done.

I know people who have never run a task force because they think the idea of completing a bunch of missions in a row for a badge and reward merits is dumb. Same goes for trials.

There are people who are saying Magisterium is fun in its own right, just as there are people who are saying it's the wors thing ever forced on us in the history of the game.

Point being, "well-designed" isn't as black and white of an issue as you're implying. One person's fun is anothers tedium, and that is just simply human nature.

Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect

The devs would have to be frigging morons to not have seen this coming.

But....they've got to get people to run the new stuff somehow.

If they hadn't gated Hybrid behind running this one trial and instead made it unlockable with normal IXP....how many people would have simply burned Incarnate threads, Astrals, and Empyreans to unlock it and never bothered running it at all? I'm guessing a significant number. Because, much to the devs surprise, many people don't actually LIKE the trials, they just run them to get the new shinies so they can make older level 50 content completely trivial.

So, if they hadn't gated it like they did, the devs would have spent the last couple months working on something that ends up being run about as frequently as the Shard TFs. It would suck to work hard on something only to have it ignored.

So they gated it. Now the first part of it is being farmed and the rest of it ignored.

From the devs perspective, having people play the first part of it has got to be better than having almost no one play it at all.

Originally Posted by SoulTouch

Any comparisons damage wise to another blaster set?

Originally Posted by UberGuy

I'm not going to gripe if they tone Tyrant down. However, I do not think they should start with that. I think they should fix/adjust Notice of the Well to affect the full league every time. The explicitly stated intent of the Lights of the Well was to allow leagues to choose their difficulty. Making that mechanic random is in wild opposition to that stated intent - by definition random is not controllable. Giving 9 level shifts to the buffing Defender (or to Dark Servant or some tier 1 Mastermind henchman) is not terribly useful for defeating Tyrant in a DPS contest.

So if they do anything, they should fix/adjust the Notice first, and then see how that affects success.

Despite that I personally would not have built the trial the with the front-loaded iXP begging to be farmed, I will be disappointed in the devs if they abruptly cut off the "farmability" without a thoughtful pass at the whole trial. I don't expect them to be heavy-handed with this, and will be quite disappointed in them if I am wrong about that.

Originally Posted by JayboH

CoH doesn't use more than 2 gigs, I thought.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

Wait, princess hat? I was abroad and had no time for City of Heroes. What did I miss? Was it exclusive? New? Can I get it after the fact for real money?

Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex

What's ironic about about allowing 8 person teams is that it actually narrows the search criteria down and probably ends up meaning you form as fast or faster than a team with a hard-cap of 4 (and the game balanced around that). Part of the reason CoX teaming works so well is that it the cost of picking up a "wrong" member is generally low. In other games, if one member is bad at his or her role, the whole team is in serious trouble. The fact that other games force you into very canned roles contributes as well.

Originally Posted by Cende

There is that, too, but I can't speak to that with any reliability. I know that the computer can have an effect; if your computer is up there in cool, then I don't know what else to look at. Apparently latency is one of the things.

However, the fact that some people can finish the mission without any problems means it's not entirely the mission, either. I'm not saying that there aren't tweaks they could possibly perform to help it out a bit, but I am saying that the cries of "It's completely bugged, how dare they release it in that state!" may be a little unfounded.

As a note of comparison, I've got a quad core with a Raedon 5750 and 16 GB RAM (I do enough at once that I asked for and got the RAM when we upgraded the machine).

Originally Posted by EvilGeko

We'll see what they do, if anything. But I got a giggle when a farm ended and the person who put it together immediately put together a BAF.

Originally Posted by EvilGeko

Agreed. Tyrant should be worth about 25% by himself. But then since I also agree that the devs will likely just nerf the IDF farm, I'm glad I knocked it out on my main incarnates already.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

They need to keep challenging us, but at the same time show how much more power we now have - and the easiest way to do that is to let us use Incarnate powers on non-Incarnate content and totally trash everything that gets in our way, and keep the challenges for the Trials.
Incanrate powers weren't designed for non-Incanrate content, because non-Incarnate content was never designed for Incarnate powers.
For example, when the devs made the STF, they never thought that Dr. Aeon's clones would be wiped out with one multi-Judgement strike, or that the team would have Lore pets to use against the Arachnos Patrons, or that we'd be able to fight Recluse at 50+1.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

But that level of power destroys the standard game - we were already massively powerful at 50 - the Incarnate powers make any pre-Incarnaet content trivial
The Incarnate powers are designed for Incanrate content - being able to use them in non-Incarnate content is just a neat little bonus to let us show just how far above it we now are.

Originally Posted by 8_Ball

Hell...it's hard to get on a full run now, they're all farms..Not that I'm complaining mind you, unlocked Hybrid on two characters in less than an hour on farms (12 league members) on full trial 24 man runs it would have taken 2/3 times as long. Very broken reward system IMO.

Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill

... you ARE more powerful still. You still have an AOE attack, fairly quickly recharging with no crash, you didn't have before. You're just not trivializing the non-incarnate content with it toned down. Hell, "Weak?" You're still a fully slotted out level 50. Since when is that "weak?"

Seriously, when one or two people can basically tell the rest of a task force "Hey, do whatever, we'll clear the missions," *it's overpowered.* And yes, I *have* been on teams - typically ITFs - where we were told JUST that. It's not fun at all to be basically told "You're not needed." It goes back to the days when a tank would herd up a map, a blaster would nuke the result (or the tank would just herd them into a dumpster) and everyone else got to stand around, or you'd get invited to something just so the leader could reveal the map and kick everyone. That wasn't fun either.

Originally Posted by Shubbie

Except farming and aborting the mission every 7 minutes is tedious boring and stupid.

The trail should have not been buffed.

IT was a big mistake.

Originally Posted by Doctor Roswell

She tried like forty of them, but all the good ones were taken by old never-activated trial accounts and people who haven't played since back before global handles were implemented in issue 4. So she had to improvise.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

In an ideal world, they would have given us another trial and/or some other way to earn iXP for Hybrid. For whatever reason, they didn't. I'm neither supporting nor condemning that decision, because I don't know what went into it.

I can tell you that if was in charge of design, God help us all, and all the other things we have going on were handed down to me from on high (one iTrial, no new iSalvage, new iTrial the only source of Hybrid unlock) we wouldn't be able to farm it like that. The reward would be better distributed through the trial. And frankly, a lot of people who are farming it right now would probably be annoyed by that, because right now they have an easy path to unlock that I wouldn't have given them.

Originally Posted by Zombie Man

3. For a while, BAF and Lambda were the only sources of the two iXP types for their respective incarnate power trees. Same thing here. Sure, people didn't like that set-up previously, but this is nothing new. New content, new carrot to do it. This should not be surprising for an MMO. Besides, for those in the 'too hard' camp, the MagITrial is so incredibly easy to farm for it's unique iXP with the huge spawn fight up front... and that's exactly what folks are doing... just like they did with Lambda.

Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum

Originally Posted by UberGuy

Let's be honest here. Any additional means of progress would be alt-unfriendly. If they had added progress to level 60, that would be alt-unfriendly, and the longer it took to reach 60, the more unfriendly it would be.

There's nothing about the Incarnate approach that's inherently more alt-unfriendly than that, with one exception. Level shifts inherently break the SSK system, which is indirectly hard on alting compared to availability of SSK play. IMO, we need to never see any more slottable level shifts from iPowers, because that will drive further diffusion of players into content for which are appropriate to their characters' current shifts. I don't think CoH can afford that currently. (Level shifts granted in missions, like the ones we get from the pillars, are fine, as long as they're available to everyone in the mission.)

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

That's not the way the Incarnate system is set up story-wise - we've already been told that Battalion is a bigger threat than Tyrant and the loyalists, and that defeating the dictatorship is required for us to get enough power to face the Coming Storm.
The Incarnate system is set up to be at the cutting edge of the evolving meta-storyline, where we get new "chapters" with each new Trial.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

That's weird, because I see people swapping alts between Trials all the time.



There's more past Omega too - but the Incarnate system's been great so far, so there's no reasont ot hink that it won't continue to be great as we reach Omega and then go past it.