Dr Harmony

Typically, I'll pick about 6 to 8 powers from my primary and secondary. You get 20 power picks by level 38, so that leaves room for about 6 pool powers as well.

Super Reflexes requires you to take most powers. I'd consider skipping Elude (the final power) and taking everything else.

Fire Armor has skippable powers: Temperature Protection first of all is quite skippable, maybe Consume is the next most skippable.

For both powersets I'd definitely consider the Fighting Pool - take one of the attacks (neither are great) and Tough and Weave - these add to your defensive primary powers.
Also grab a travel power from the pools - whatever you feel like.

Super Reflexes may benefit from the Medicine Pool, grab Aid Self since you have no self heal.

For your secondary, take as many attacks as you need to keep on attacking.

For Martial Arts you have more single target attacks than you need. You can drop one or even two of Crane Kick, Cobra Strike and Crippling Axe quite easily. Storm Kick is a must have, it adds to your Defence whenever you use it.

I agree with a lot of what you say, Centurion.

I think a case could be made for more cosmetic customisation, say having the mechanical powers of Radiation Blast with the look and feel of Energy Blast.

This could work similar to the alternate animation system which we already have. Its a lot of UI work and probably some under the hood tinkering, but at least it wouldn't involve rebalancing any power sets, which is where the real headaches would begin.

Its almost like the Citadel TF was written by a robot.

On the other hand, I've opften been on teams running Council radio missions back to back and getting upset when they have to switch enemy types. I think the difference is on Citadel you can't just leave when you've had enough, and the radio missions at least take place on different maps.

Yep. Would even work for a snippy Braniac 5 style super-intelligent, who points out that you missed the obvious drag marks that mean the last Bomb Crate was down the corridor on the left that we passed on the way in.

One enhanced senses trick that currently works by the way:

I keep a macro that was set up like this:

macro AV "bind q targetcustomnext thing"

So I can modify it and execute it whenever I want for aerial reconnaisance purposes in outdoor maps. Just edit the macro, change the word "thing" to bomb or portal or whatever, press and then fly around tapping the q key for instant telescopic vision.
(The "AV" stands for "Amazing Vision". )

A quick reply - I'd aim for 32% Ranged Defence and a resistance shield. Going the Smashing/Lethal route is much easier on characters with melee attacks due to Kinetic Combat.

Take the snipe and slot it, Bolt, Burst and Blast with Thunderstrike
- that 15% Ranged there, very cheaply.

Slot Energy Torrent or Explosive Blast with Malice of the Corrupter for another 3.75%. They're expensive, about 100 mill all up I think.

Stick the Steadfast unique in your armour for 3%, about 30 million?

Hover and Combat Jumping add about another 4% (and immobilise protection, very good for Kinetics.)

That all adds up to 25.5%.

You can get another 1.5% by slotting Nova with Eradication (4 slots of this are great)

At this point you've got around 40% defence on a small luck pill, a great heal, -Damage on hard targets and about 30% Smash/Lethal/other resistance, and all the enemy are falling like ninepins due to your knockback. You'll be plenty tough enough with layered defence like that.

Beef it up further with 6 Pacing of the Turtle in Siphon Speed and/or 6 Trap of the Hunter in an epic immobilise like Electric Fence, or the really costly option of 5% from the purple confuse set in World of Confusion in Psychic Mastery.

Damage buffs are easy to come by.

Did you know that any full team doing Hero Tips can achieve +320% damage for 30 seconds at the mere cost of a 3.67s animation?

That's Call To Justice, the alignment power, that applies a team To Hit and Damage buff.

But how many times have you seen a team do the "Avengers Assemble" before a group, or even an AV?

I find Kinetics to be a really well balanced set. It's fast and dicey and you never feel safe like you do with almost all other support sets, but Transfusion props it up in the early game. It offers Transference and Fulcrum Shift later on, and then in the late game performs surprisingly well against AVs due to the damage debuffs.

Thats a very good point.

I have to admit that i havent finsihed the DA story arcs yet, and having seen what Max has in store I'd definitely appreciate those extra level shifts now.

And being able to race through these arcs is important if you want to push the boundaries of a casual incarnate lifestyle.
There's a potential 6 components and 2 Empyrean merits per week in it, which amounts to 160 threads per week.

I think they're a cool idea, but have a flawed implementation.

I last played with them a few years ago, but I remember it being a big case of balance by irritation. Your effective alpha strike was limited by your own patience. I knew I could lay 16 or so before the first one vanished, but never did, no matter how bad the EB I was trying to solo out of sheer boredom. After ten I'd rather die to whatever was in the room next door.

I'd suggest speeding up the recharge and animation, keep the interrupt, but only allow for 5 at a time. When you place #6, #1 vanishes. Place #7, #2 vanishes, and so on. This way you can lay down your kill box fairly quickly and then get on with the action, even lay down a trip mine mid-fight if you feel lucky and un-aggroed.

The damage is about scale 2? (ie two standard AoEs). So the interrupt needs to be there to stop mid-combat mine spamming if the recharge is sped up.

This does unfortunately spoil things for those with the patience to currently lay out 18 mines, so its not a perfect solution. Maybe have some way to toggle between these fast but limited number mines and slow ones we have now, like the Swap Ammo power?

I made my Fire/Cold Corruptor instead of a Defender because of the unfair Blaster values in Rain of Fire for Corruptors, even though it meant giving up the self heal proc in the Defender set and waiting till 35 to get my double rain with Sleet.

But, I still think its good that these adjustments are being made. I didn't like making that decision at that time. And I doubt I'll really notice the slightly lower damage from one power to be honest. Sleet-Rain of Fire will still rock.

I immediately thought of Titanium Coating.

Positron's Blast currently gives us +1.58% Fire/Cold Resist, so its maybe not unreasonable to expect under the new system that the three mez resist bonuses become around +2% damage resist to each pair.

3 or 4 sets of those would be nice for any Fire, Elec or Dark Armorer for sure, especially with 2.5% Melee Defence to ice the cake. I'd look at switching my Brute out of Impervium Armor for sure. Nothing hugely transformative, but it could become the new Reactive Armor instead of the set you use for frankenslotting fodder.

Add in 5 of these and an Impervious Skin unique and you could be looking at a good 3-5% res to all six types per power, which would be pretty staggering.

Obviously, doing this now would be beyond crazy.

Brutes do represent a cool mechanism that a few comic characters have - the harder you hit them the stronger they get. But, having a whole archetype to represent the Hulk and Sebastian Shaw from the Hellfire Club would be a bit odd if we were designing the game from the bottom up. If you were deisgning the game from scratch you could probably get away with just making this a defensive power set that Tanks, Scrappers or Stalkers could use.

But, even then you'd lose some concepts - eg you can make a character who gets hotter the harder you hit them (/Fire Brute) or sparks more (/Elec brute) and so on.

Game mechanic wise I like having the option for having or not having the Fury minigame.

So, there are these two archetypes for historical reasons, same as why there are Corrupters and Defenders. But it isn't making the game any worse or confusing, just giving us more choices.

Ive often taken, slotted and used Kick or Boxing on melee characters, in order to get to Tough. I usually replaced their Teir 1 or 2 ability, and havent suffered a noticeable drop in damage output from it.

If you have a character you enjoy playing, have got them to 50, and would like to carry on playing them, but don't enjoy Incarnate Trials, what's next? I'd imagined that the non-trial incarnate path would be long and grindy, but have been amazed at how easy it is. Amazed enough to prompt me to write this guide.

I've recently started doing this on a couple of characters. Wundastar (Fire/SS Brute) is an extremely capable solo-er and runs x8 missions on her own. Utopia Jones (Beam Rifle/Pain Dom Corrupter) doesn't solo too well due to lack of personal defensive abilities, and plays best in a team. Her progress shows that you dont need to be a flavour-of-the-month farmer to do this.
Both have successfully kept on fighting crime in Paragon City, teamed and solo, and worked towards their incarnate powers at a staggeringly quick pace.
Both had their Alpha and Judgement slots useable within a few days.

INCARNATE SHARDS and ALPHA
Use these to unlock your Alpha slot, which will give you your level shift eventually. You get these per enemy defeat from non-incarnate content, and their drop rate is not reduced by team size. So running radio mission or hero tips will give you these. A non-speed ITF typically hands out about 4 to 6 of these for an hour or so's work. Radio or tips missions would do exactly the same. 5 Hero tips on a team of 8 earned me 7 shards. Enemy level doesn't affect shard drops, so run team missions at +0/x8 for best effect. To get shards on your own, play at +0, and set for as many as you can handle.

Level 50 task forces also let you earn a 4-shard item instead of merits at the end, so this can speed up your Alpha slot progress.
If you have Vanguard Merits to spare, 150 of these make the 4-shard Gr'ai Matter item. Check your alpha recipes for this and plan accordingly. If you're a capable solo-er it may be worth knocking out some Borea missions to make this item, since you'll accumulate Shards and Vanguard Merits.

A Notice of the Well is handed out for completing the Weekly Task Force. This can reap triple dividends if you're lucky. An ITF earned me the Essence of the Incarnate item, a Notice of the Well, and 6 shards, enough to unlock Tier 3 Spiritual easily. A weekly Lady Grey would also earn you Vanguard Merits of course.

Tier 1 Alpha requires 12 shards, Tier 2 requires 20 more shards, and Tier 3 requires just 8 more shards plus a Notice of the Well.
Its quite feasible to have the Tier 1 alpha unlocked in a few days just from running five Hero Tip missions a day, or some similar non-incarnate activity.
I found the Tier 3 (and the level shift) took me just over a week to achieve, usually around the time I'd unlocked Tier 1 Interface and Judgement.

INCARNATE XP
Incarnate XP drops from enemies in Dark Astoria. For reference, Wundastar ran a five mission arc by Heather Townsend at +1/x8 or +1/x4 for a couple of missions, and unlocked 32% of the Judgement and Interface slots. This is equivalent to 20 threads roughly, or two 5 minute missions for Ephram Sha.
Utopia Jones running at +0/x1 for a repeatable mission unlocks about 0.5% of each slot per run.
Incarnate XP drops slowly compared to how you can accumulate threads.

INCARNATE THREADS
These drop from enemies in Dark Astoria solo content at random, maybe 1 or 2 per mission. You can also get them from three main sources:
1) Ephram Sha - he hands out repeatable missions that can give you 10 Threads per day
2) Signature Story Arc (SSA) - running Theoden of the Lost's arc gives you another 10 threads per week. Run it again to get an Astral merit which can make 4 threads if you like, and once more for a Hero merit to finance your incarnate activites.
3) Notice of the Well - complete the weekly task force every week for a Notice, which converts into 40 threads (Shards->Upgrade in the Incarnate Powers Convert tab). Save one of these for your tier 3 Alpha, convert the rest to threads. I recommend using the first to unlock Judgement quickly, and the second will be yours by the time Tier 3 Alpha becomes a possibility.

That's 120 threads per week for 5 minutes per day (Ephram Sha) another 15 minutes per week (SSA #1) and a single task force. Even a confirmed solo-er can get 80 threads per week. You'll probably pick up another 10 doing Sha's missions each week.

You can also get 10 reward merits and 5 threads for defeating Adamastor, if you summon him in Talos or Sharkhead. This is done by buying the Summon Adamastor recipe in Wentworths, crafting it, and then using the power at the summoning site by the old Dark Astoria gates in Talos, or Potter's Field in Sharkhead. It takes all of five minutes to do with a small team of 4 or more, and the rewards are on a 20 hour cooldown per character, so you could potentially make another 35 threads per week this way.

Incarnate Threads convert to incarnate XP, and also convert to the components used to craft non-Alpha incarnate abilities.
Each iXP conversion costs 1,000,000 inf, so be prepared to make some money. A single hero merit can probably net you 50 million as a Kinetic Combat piece if you buy the recipe and craft it, so the extra weekly SSA will finance this path. Unlocking all four slots with threads will cost you 150 million inf.

Judgement and Interface slots take 30 threads to unlock each, and Lore and Destiny take 45 more threads after that.
Tier 1 abilities take 60 threads to create, 3 x 20 for each common component.
Tier 2 abilities take another 100 threads.
Tier 3 take another 340 threads, which is starting to get a bit grindy, so choose which slots you really want to Tier 3 with this in mind. Lore and Destiny Level shifts are irrelevant to this lifestyle. I'd suggest focussing on Interface and Lore for the best bang-per-buck above Tier 1, but that will vary with build.

The story arcs in Dark Astoria give you a thread-based component at the end of each one, which is equivalent to 20 threads for each common. If you do run these, you should first check in with Taskmaster Gabriel and accept his mission because he'll give you 2 Empyrean Merits for completing all 6 arcs. These convert to 20 threads each.

JUDGEMENT IN 4 DAYS!
Nothing says "I'm an incarnate now" like unleashing a big old nuke every second or third spawn. You can unlock the Judgement Slot within 4 days of completing Mender Ramiel's arc.
You need 90 threads to unlock the slot and build a Tier 1 Judgement power.
Thats 40 from a Weekly Task Force, 10 from the SSA, and 10 per day from Ephram Sha for 4 days gives you 90 threads. The moment you get these you can unlock and craft and start using your Judgement power. The extra iXP and threads from even 3 Ephram Sha missions may push you over, so 3 days is not unreasonable. By the end of the second week you'll have another 150 threads, enough to unlock either Lore or Interface and equip to Tier 1.

Confirmed solo artists will of course take 4 days longer for the first unlock, but even so will be able to use Judgement in around 1 week of playing a +0/x1 mission for five minutes every day.

From there, it can take somewhere between 3 and 5 weeks to unlock the other three abilities and craft a tier 1, even if you solo exclusively.

The self-only damage buffs in Pain aren't much to write home about. The Absorb Pain clone gives you 25% ( a small red ) and rezzing someone gives you +30% with a crash later. You won't be spamming either of these powers.

A Mastermind will give all their pets the World of Pain buff (+16%) and can choose a pet to give PainBringer (+50%) when its up, which a solo Pain Corrupter cant do.

So I'd say its debatable that MM's really lose out on much at all over Corrupters in terms of how damage boost are applied.

I'd still like to see a better way to do Superspeedsters like the Flash.

Currently the only way to get unsupressed superspeed in combat is Kinetics (Siphon Speed), which does not reward you for zipping around dodging and using melee attacks. I've played Kineticists and jousted with Sands of Mu, and it feels great but isnt very effective.

I've tried a few times to accumulate movement set bonuses and slot sprint for combat mobility on melee characters, and it never feels quite fast enough.

A Superspeed defence set with a built-in movement boost toggle would be awesome.

My gripe for today - some defensive toggles take too long to activate.

I'm playing my level 50 Fire Brute, and tend to use Rise of the Phoenix rather proactively and frequently *cough*

Its great to have a self-rez that does damage and grants 15 seconds of immunity, but those 15 seconds get eaten up very quickly by reactivating my shields.

Fire Shield - 1.67s, the high end of acceptable
Plasma Shield - 3s of staring at the floor palms down doing nothing, required as my main mez protection.
Tough - 3.1s of unladylike chest thumping and howling
Weave - 0.67s, a quick bob and we're going.
Combat jumping - no activation time at all?

Add another 1.5s for Healing Flames and whatever for some inspiration gobbling (ornage and purple) and thats over ten seconds of standing there, often getting beaten on again if there are ranged enemies nearby.

The part that bugs me is that the animation times seem pretty much random, looking at Red Tomax.
http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...etype.php?at=8

Dark Armor has 1.17s for all defensive toggles.
Electric Armour gets a couple of 0.67s and a 1.17s for its main defence.
Some other sets get 3s clunkers: Invincibility, Integration, Evasion and Rise to the Challenge.
So three sets with a self-rez seem to get a 3s+ animation to turn on their main mez protection again (Regen, Fire, Willpower). I doubt this is by design, or there to serve any important balance issue.

It would be great if these could be normalised like the Tier 1 and 2 blasts were.

I think the long recharge time-limited toggle is an excellent idea.

I agree with Comrade, that once activated they currently lead to two annoying outcomes. This is not so much a case of balancing a power with a penalty as blancing a power with irritation, which is a bad thing.

I'd say Spiritual as a general rule. There are very few builds that dont benfit from extra recharge, and you often don't have good powers slotted for full ED-capped Recharge.
If you have important heal-based powers (Willpower, Fire) all the more reason to go Spiritual, and the Stun will often have some minor use, eg Rise of the Phoenix.

I did this for my Fire/SS and havent regretted it, as it brings Footstomp and KO Blow up faster and makes my heal faster and more potent.

If you dont have heals, check out Agility for the other Recharge route, with a side of End Mod, which will at least boost Stamina. Shield also beneifts a little bit from the extra Defence, although these numbers are never huge you'll get a few more percent out of this.


Claws/WP is an exception that won't benefit from Recharge as much as most builds. (No build up, smooth attack chain, no Shield Charge or click heal). Vigor is the other heal tree, but you probably dont need the end redux (Claws is end light, WP has QR) or the accuracy (no-one does really at level 50). Resilient will give you a smidge more resistance and improve your Taunting.
None of the Alphas really stand out for this pairing as an obvious choice.

I'd say as a general rule:
Spirtual - if you have heal powers
Vigor - if you run out of end or dont have a heal
Everything else
Musculature - hardly ever because the damage buff gets lost in Fury.

I'd be wary of adding personal protection for the bubbler into Force Bubble, D. It has the ability to draw a lot of aggro on to the user due to its large radius touching groups before the rest of the team.

If the FF-er isn't soft-capped to range, and the Absorb isn't too large, this could in some circumstances end up shortening your lifespan and dropping the keystone to the team.

Force Bubble currently has it uses, so we can't remove the large radius repel effect.


However, adding some Absorb to Repulsion Field could work. It has a tiny radius, and is generally used to either protect yourself of start juggling something dangerous in melee range.

I think that the ally shields (Deflection and Insulation) are the perfect place to add some Absorb, and don't add any balance issues.

These powers should make a team pretty much indestructible, and already do much of the time. The player's given up solo peformance by taking a buff set, and given up offensive multipliers by taking Force Field. The defence should be rock solid.

The only time they don't work currently is because Defence, especially without DDR, is the most easily circumvented layer of defence in the game. Adding Absorb would fix that. In the absence of Defence debuffs or To Hit bonuses, the absorb wouldn't change much because the team are already protected to the hilt, and no-one's dying.

Force Fields could certainly do with an extra layer of mitigation.

There's nothing quite like devoting your entire primary to shielding your team, and having that completely undone by a single DE emanator or CoT quicksand in the 30s.
Adding some absorb to the shields would be thematic, and provide an extra buff against these situations. It also gives the set something to offer players who are soft-capped to defence on their own.

Some residual absorb from PFF would be an interesting addition too.

I'm a big fan of the single ally buff powersets like Sonic, Force Field, Thermal and Cold Dom.

They're fairly PUG-proof in that you can buff someone and let them run off on their own for four minutes without having to chase them down, or worry about getting everyone to gather for a team buff.
Its easy to buff during fights on the run with these sets as they are now.

I'm currently trying Cold Domination for the first time and really enjoying it, but I'll echo Sonic Resonance as a set that benefits just about any team big-time - its the quiet achiever of buff sets.

I'd recommend Defender/Corrupter for a balanced contribution of team buffage and area damage, both of which benefit pretty much any team.

Thats a great idea, Starfall.

I've got Lore unlocked on one character, so I can have a preview of the drones there.

I'd love an Enhanced Senses Power Pool like this, that provided extra info on your map.

Tier 1
- Ability to locate all glowies.
- Ability to reveal nearest group of enemies on a map, or nearest named boss if there is one. Great for those old "kill-alls" where a few Devoruing earth swarm are left behind, or Manticore Task Force.
Tier 2
- A combat ability with some +Perception and +To hit maybe?
Tier 3
- Something along the lines of Surveillance, a single target -Res/-Def power?

It could work for X-Ray Vision, Telepathy or Tracking Scent or a number of options like that.