Bright

I could see some of the EBs being "AV-able" if a team was set for that. Romulus, Requiem, Scorpion, Blue... maybe Mot's big Purple People-Eater... But it really wouldn't make sense for all of them to be. Tub Ci, for instance? He's chump-material any way you look at him. Like the Mother Ceres, he's fine as an EB I'd say. Curb-stomping suits "supporting cast"-level goons like them.

The toughest one to make the AV/EB choice for, IMO, would be Marcus... The Sentinal really walks that line between being a Big Bad and a being a Speed Bump story-wise. He *looks* like he ought to be an AV, big spikey monster that he is... But is he really supposed to be as much of a potential threat as the Purple Guy? Of the two, the Purple one just seems to suit AV status a little better.

Thinking about it... I guess I do have a few THE's in the crew. 'Thing is, they tend not to be "big picture" THE's tied to established canon or major events. They're only unique in certain small ways, often... as mentioned up thread with the idea of making your own events... things that would only matter to me.

Take the Nemissary, for instance. He's just an A in a lot of ways. One rather eccentric Oranbegan Death Mage out of a whole, apparently endless crop of them. Where he ventures into THE territory is entirely a matter of individual back-story. I've simply never seen another Death Mage mentioned as even having a wife, much less leaving Oranbega behind to look for one who went missing. So, in that one way my poor, abandoned Thanodaemus is unique. He's "That One Death Mage Who Got Married and Went Walk-About"... Eventually, if the Unquiet Bride has her way, he'll be "That One Death Mage Who Got Married, Went Walk-About and Somehow Ended Up Being a Hero in Spite of Himself". But his THE is a small THE. It's not a "I'm the one who threw a wrench in the whole works" THE.

There are six arcs in all... and you end up with six tables, even though one arc (Max's) doesn't give a reward table at all, while another (the Dream Doctor's) gives you two. (Those two from the Doc do share the same 20-hour cool-down timer, though, so after the first run you wouldn't be able to pick the same type of reward from both.)

I still have Semnai (That lvl 12 Psi blaster I was trying to solo awhile back- o_0) hanging around in Praetoria... 'Wouldn't mind a bit of teaming, even at lower levels, to push her closer to an escape from the place. It made perfect sense to start her there, given the whole "former seer" gig, but... sheeze. I had no clue at the time just how tough it would be to get her out on her own. Soloing a blaster Primal-side is dicey enough, but doing it in Praetoria is just pain-in-the-rear material.

Re: the ship raids... I would prefer to bring the Nemissary or the Bride, given that my goal for the weekend is to get the two of them from the mid-40s to 50, but it's starting to sound like I'd get the evil eye for bringing them instead of someone who would CONTRIBUTE MOAR!!1! by virtue of being "finished" already. You're likely to end up with my Empath or Force Field defender.

If I could replace the actual Statesman start-up screen with the rainbow version.... I would absolutely do it. It makes me grin.

I don't know, Remus... I can kind-of see where you're coming from, and I'm with you on the personal SG issue. (I have a second account just so I can invite characters to my own-) The "not so super"-bit though? I'm not so sure about that.

I know we're not supposed to compare different games here, but I'm going to take the risk, just to illustrate something...

My "other MMO" is that pretty Korean game with the stabby, winged people in over-done armor. (Hush. I have a thing about wings. ) My current favorite over there is a Templar. Think of that as something like your classic Shield/Broadsword Tank. She's a relatively low damage/high survivability meat-shield, with a Taunt and a Gauntlet effect and everything. She's decently equipped for a mid-level toon and I play her reasonably well.

Two even-level Lt-scale enemies can absolutely take her apart if I'm not VERY careful. I'm talking "eat your face before you can blink twice" here. Even using exactly the right things at exactly the right second, she'll still come out of that fight battered and half dead. That's in no way unexpected or unusual for the game she's in, or for many other MMOs out there. It's "standard difficulty".

Now, keeping that standard in mind... Think about what even an SOed, run-of-the-mill City Tank can do in comparison, much less what a kitted-out full Incarnate is capable of. My blue-side main is a 50+3 WP/Dual Blade with a pretty solid build. Even when he was mid-level without all of his fancy toys what he could handle vs what Qinn can survive is absolutely night and day. Palrah feels very much like a superhero to me. He can afford to be a little fearless. My Templar will never be able to do that.

So, maybe it's just a matter of perspective as much as anything. Have you tried any other games, Remus? (I would actually recommend trying others out if you haven't. I think it's useful to see the way different games handle different design goals and different player expectations-) City characters really are a lot more super than most of their digital cousins. They may not be All That when you look at what they face internally in the City world itself, but they really, honestly are worlds away from your average Elyos, Jedi, Night Elf or Hobbit.

ETA: I know you clarified that it isn't entirely a matter of power per se... But I do think that the relative power of player characters has something to do with it. It doesn't feel very heroic getting pummeled to death by a pair of over-grown hamsters. (Trust me. I know. Freakin' MuMus. >_<) Being able to jump into a pack of two dozen Praetorian Greater Devoured and coming out the other side though? Oh HELL yeah. And that's a direct product of the power level of the characters involved.

w00t!
'Grats to you guys.

It still looks very Flasheart to me... "Where HAVEN'T I been!"

It sucks that the update is giving you such annoying problems, Shadow, but this...

The Stalker changes are Love. Sweet, stabby Love.

It does pretty well for Stalkers, honestly. The changes to their Assassin's attack are useful, and having a higher HP cap is always nice.

Dark Astoria may be very slow, very frustrating and rather poor as a "solo Incarnate path"... but it's an interesting-looking zone and the story arcs are entertaining.

So... there are a couple of things for the "Win" column.

As it stands right now, after running the arcs one time through for fun and a few low-level components, DA is only going to be useful to would-be Incarnates for exactly two things...

1) Running one repeatable a day and then street-hunting for stray threads and a handful of iXP when there's absolutely nothing else going on, and...

2) Getting one filler Common and a couple of Astrals a day by speed-running twice through the first arc. (And yes, odds are you'll only get Commons and Astrals rather than better components or Emps. Enough people have run these things on Beta to get a pretty good feel for the drop tables.)

Past that? It's a pretty bad "solo path"... And forget about having a mixed-faction team after the first arc run-through. They're only repeatable via Oro, meaning they can't be run co-op.

Incarnate-wise, if you want to progress at anything close to a reasonable rate, you're still going to be pushed into the Trials. DA is filler, at best. That's just how things are at the moment, and personally I'll be shocked if anything changes in less than six months or a year.

Daos is high on the list... My favorite stalker would like nothing better than to see that jerk chopped into fish-bait and fed to the Leviathan.

My night widow would say the same thing about Phipps. In her opinion, he practices the kind of petty, smarmy, vindictive evil that gives real, serious villainy a bad name.

You better mean it this time, Z...

If not, you know we're all going to gang up and feed you to Mot.

As I said in the other thread, I want that sash very, very badly for my two PPD-affiliated male Peacebringers... Their Awakened costumes (which are approximations anyway, due to the patterns used in the originals-) will never look "right" without them, and that makes me a little sad.

It's not a terribly complex piece from the look of it, so I guess I just don't understand why it's never been done in spite of players pretty much begging the devs for it for so many years. Is there someone in the art department who's just dead-set against it for some reason? Who doesn't think PC Kheldian characters "deserve" it, somehow?

I don't know. It just seems strange that after so long our guys still can't have the thing... Not even after a character-friendly version was obviously added to the game.

'Sounds like a plan.