Bosstone

That is the best thing ever to be a thing.

I dunno. If done right, I imagine it would be a lot like the current game of solo/team play and TFs. "If I keep playing this arc, it'll be another night or two before I can unlock Destiny...or I could jump on this Keyes that's forming right now and unlock it tonight." Same as with normal content. "I could keep playing this story arc and slog my way through 27-30 over the next few nights...or I could jump on the Citadel that's forming in channel and get a big chunk of XP right now."

Obviously the sheer number of trials will probably go down, but maybe that's to the good. Then, the people you get for the league actually have an interest in completing it, rather than wanting to push a button to make candy come out. I'm not going to bet on how hard it will be to find 16-24 people at any one time, though.

Which naturally raises the question: Is it worth trying to appease players who will distort the truth for their own rhetorical ends?

Under the old model, if you were on a tight budget you wouldn't get to play the game at all. Now you can play even if you can only afford $5 a month. No, you don't get everything, but before you had nothing for $5.

What about them? Their afflictions are theirs to deal with. Should a store stop selling wine because a recovering alcoholic might wander in?

What's insulting is this misrepresentation. You don't have to gamble to play the game. You have to gamble if you want some minor cool prizes that make the game nicer but not playable. And I'm not even convinced it's gambling, as you always get something.

It's entirely up to you how much you want that costume. And by no means is a costume you never had before necessary to make the game playable.

I understand and even sympathize with many of the objections to these packs. Yours are weak and based on falsehoods. If you're not going to buy, don't buy, but don't act like you're not going to get to play the freaking game if you don't buy them.

I said aesthetic, not thematic. The mechanics of Shield Defense, ie the way it works, is completely divorced from the aesthetics, ie the way it looks. If Shield was just a regular aura, or could be made either a regular aura or a physical shield, then you could use it with any two-handed weapon, just like every other defense set.

Pull. Honoree, Holtz, and the Rikti are all unconnected spawns. Pull Honoree and nobody else should follow.

Almost everyone has access to SOME ranged attack. If you don't, you're probably capable of jumping in there anyway. And if you're not, and by some chance you either don't have a vet temp power or a leftover temp from a mission, it takes all of two minutes to get a Revolver or Envenomed Dagger off the AH.

I know some people think temp powers are cheating. There are also people who think inspirations are cheating. These people are loons.

I think we may be talking at cross-purposes. I used Katana and Broadsword because they're very similar, yet one is one-handed and can be used with Shield and one is two-handed. Mechanically I can't see any reason this would be so; the decision to exclude some sets from being paired with Shield was an aesthetic one, not a balance one. It's similar to the decision to not give Stalkers Titan Weapons.

It's a shame, because Shield has some interesting powers that no other defense powerset has. It's also not a very big deal, since there's just enough overlap that you can approximate it well enough by taking SR or Energy and throwing in Spring Attack.

Yeah, the Tsoo Katana, which is like a stick of metal with some cloth wrapped around the end. Ooogleh.

Do you run tips at all?

I would not be surprised if the solo/team content turns out to look very much like the tip system.

Didn't say they did. I brought up the argument. Balance is usually the reason for the trade-off between sword and board and two-hander in games, but it doesn't exist in City.

It's not something I feel terribly strongly about, but it is sort of an odd thing.

I don't have a problem with the sound effects myself. They're not earth-shattering, but it helps make the set feel like you just cracked a whole bunch of people over the head.
Too true. I felt invincible for most of my teens when I was street-sweeping in Port Oakes and taking Mook paper misisons and such, then immediately got my butt kicked when I walked into a Circle of Thorns mission and got swarmed by a ton of Spectral Knights with their bloody -to-hit.

It looks like the advantage here is if you have multiple Incarnate powers of the same slot. If you've got Cimerorans and Longbow, when you switch them you have to fiddle with the powers in the trays. It's not a terribly vexing ordeal, but this way your method of access never changes no matter which one you've got active at the moment.

Yes, that would transition players from the 1-50 game to Incarnate trials wonderfully and not be a brick wall at all.

You can also read Von Krieger's summaries in City Life, but naturally that's not dev communication. Can't search for it in the digests.

...Deerrrrp. Ramiel.

It wasn't a bait and switch. They had the Incarnate system planned out, but the Alpha was the introduction. Ramiel's arc isn't just for Alpha, it unlocks the entire Incarnate system for you. It's supposed to be a warning sign that the game will change past that point. Alpha was, yes, kind of a stopgap while they got the rest of the system prepped, but the trials are delivering what Ramiel promised.

You realize you don't have to play the Incarnate stuff, right? I've got exactly one character who's done anything with the trials, and I don't really feel like I'm missing anything.

You can do a semi-mockup using another set in Mids. I'm using Broadsword, since it seems to be the closest we can get to TW in terms of IO sets. It has 4 Melee, 3 PBAOE, so you just have to imagine one of the Melee as PBAOE.

I've got:
4-slotted Kinetic Combat in Crushing Blow and Follow Through,
Steadfast +3%,
Maneuvers and Weave on top of the three Energy Def powers,
Tough 4-Slotted with Reactive Armor,
Taunt 6-slotted with Mocking Beratement,
Scirocco's Dervish in the PBAOEs.

That gets me to 49% S/L, 50.5% F/C, 47% En, 37% Neg, and ~30% Psi if I 6-slot all the Sciroccos (I probably won't, Scirocco's a little light on End Reduction). Replacing Weave with Combat Jumping drops those numbers down to 46% S/L/F/C, 44% En, 34% Neg, and 27% Psi. Easier on Endurance, but less of a buffer against defense debuffs and then you need to figure out where to get more En/Neg. (Energy Drain will probably suffice, really; just hit it in a big crowd.) Keeping Tough whether you go Weave or CJ also means you get 31% S/L and 20-22% E/N resist along with Energy's passives, which is decent.

The upside is none of that relies on the defense buffs from Defensive Sweep or Energy Drain, and if you go with Agility or Nerve for the Defense buffs (I'll be going Agility), hitting Energy Drain with 10 enemies around you gets you to 56+% defense, which is spitting distance of Incarnate softcap. The downside is it's 6 toggles (7 including Tactics), so you really have to focus on End management.

Plus, it's kind of an expensive build. No purples, but the KCs and Sciroccos hurt, and take a couple weeks of tipping at the very least.

I really suggest avoiding Obliteration in TW/EA; it's extremely low on Endurance Reduction. Multi-Strike is the best for End Reduction, but it's weak on set bonuses. My plan is to 5-slot Scirocco without the Acc/Dam, then put the Multi-Strike Dam/End or Dam/End/Rech into the 6th slot.

Sure, you can't make dev communication reach everyone. What are they going to do, broadcast system messages every hour about game news? It'd just tick off the people who otherwise don't care.

Where the OP went wrong (and I'm not trying to flame, here, trying to be constructive) is that he came to the forums to ask about solo content. At that point, why not look around a little? Check Community and Dev digests. Check the Announcements forum. Look in City Life (though someone new to the forums wouldn't know about VK's coffee talk summaries).

At the very least, ask the question politely and neutrally. Getting snide about it just means you look silly if the question has a good answer. "Are there any plans for solo Incarnate content yet?" is cool. "Where's our solo Incarnate content? Clock's ticking, guys," opens you up for ownage.

The intent of the whole Incarnate system was to be something new and indeed harder than the rest of the game. It was supposed to be something only people willing to deal with raid mechanics would try.

Ramius's introduction arc is supposed to be an idiot check: if you can't figure out how to beat that arc, you don't need to be playing at the Incarnate level. Sometimes I think the worst thing they did for the Incarnate system was to make Ramius teamable, because it allows you to ignore tactics and just smash through Trapdoor and Honoree.

But that represents a fundamental issue. They wanted to make the Incarnate system exclusionary, but at the same time you really can't do that. It's simply not good business for an MMO. So they relaxed the restrictions and made it possible for players to get into the trials without thinking too hard, while still wanting to make it more of a thinking game. Thus Little Timmy.

The best solution, then, is to design the trials such that the players can self-select to be officers or grunts; the officers do the fiddly things and think about where to go and what to do when, while the grunts follow along and mash buttons. BAF does that well. At any given time the only targetable things are those things you're supposed to hit, so grunts aren't penalized for attacking them, while the officers can lead the groups to the right areas for the prisoner escape and pull the AVs to the killing ground. Badges take a little more effort, but still aren't too hard as long as players know which team they're in.

What is 'unacceptable'? That's subjective and it's different for very person. You can set the bar low enough that a majority of players will find it unacceptable, sure, but there is no actual cutoff beyond which the rate is wrong, except by an individual player's metric. If half the playerbase find the rate of solo Incarnate progress acceptable and half find it unacceptable, who's right?

There will of course be people who find that the rate of solo Incarnate progress (whatever it may be) is unacceptable, but do not wish to participate in the trials for faster rewards. If the rate of solo rewards is acceptable for most of the playerbase, then why should that small group be given much if any credibility? There comes a point at which some players are clearly just asking for the rewards to be handed to them.

Since the reward rate for solo/team play has not yet been established, it's impossible for it to be nerfed. Don't assume it's naturally going to progress at the same rate as the trials.