DragonTiger

Originally Posted by JakHammer

Would the Placate proc be useful for a Stalker?

If it is working and not broken, what power would you place it in for maximun effect?

Jak

Originally Posted by Gatecrasher

I've used Ion on my Elec/Elec Brute just fine; what is your "concern?"

Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect

This.

I've found it's actually faster to use threads to craft things, due to the better drop rate and the fact that you can convert Astral and Empyrean merits into threads.

I ran a few trials with my blaster and I had the uncommon Alpha crafted and was only a rare component away from the Rare before I'd even unlocked the Alpha slot itself. (I did it as an experiment to see how long it would take, turns out it was pretty quick)

You will craft it a LOT faster if you use threads instead of shards, mostly because of the horrible drop rate on shards.

Originally Posted by DumpleBerry

You realize you can, currently, craft just about anything you want from threads, right? Shards only work for the Alpha slot. Exchange rate and such aside, threads are "more useful" in light of the four other slots.

On your powers tab, to the right of Combat Attributes you'll find the Incarnate interface. It's horribly hidden and poorly arranged, but everything you're looking for is there--somewhat cryptically, mind you.

Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper

1. Incarnate XP simply unlocks the various Incarnate slots. Any iXP unlocks Alpha slot (or you can run Mender Ramiel's missions instead). Judgement and then Lore are unlocked with Psychic iXP; Interface and then Destiny are unlocked with Physical iXP. Psychic iXP is obtained from killing things and completing the Behavioral Adjustment Facility Trial. Physical iXP is obtained from the Lambda Trial. Both types of iXP are awarded during the Keyes Island Reactor Trial.

2. No, you cannot convert Threads into Shards

Originally Posted by Traegus

DARN YOU! DARN YOU TO HECK! you stole me concept.....
it's like stealing me lucky charms, but worser.




i've had a great concept toon for a grav troller since i started playing over 4 years ago, but no secondary really fit, was hoping they would proliferate dark to trollers, because that pairing would work well, but Time manip wins hands down! so i will have to completely ignore your dibs and make it anyways

Originally Posted by Leo_G

But for actual combat extras, I'd probably dip more into temp powers. There are just some temp powers out there that I really like and would like a couple to keep on a character. Link them to origin and give you a kind of extra task to get them/recharge them would be nice. Characters want/need a power that doesn't pertain to their origin could still pick them up, just with fewer charges.

Originally Posted by Kyriani

I missed this. When/Where was this posted?

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

I seem to have missed this thread for the longest time.

IWhen it comes to Shard drop rates, I'm not going to discuss numbers. Instead, I'm going to give my impressions as a casual (in terms of character power and gameplay "zeal") solo player and say that the drop rate is terrible. Not only is the drop rate terrible, but having Shards be drops is a bad idea in general, as it fosters the feeling that any content you play through that, due to random number generator malice, does not drop a shard is time completely and utterly wasted. Going a full day without seeing a shard is going a full day while having made ZERO progress and pretty much equal to going a full day sleeping in bed, or going out with friends, or working an actual paying job. One of the things City of Heroes used to pride itself on was the fact that you could log in for half an hour, kill some stuff and leave feeling like you accomplished something. Not much, mind you, not much at all, but SOMETHING nonetheless. Logging on for half an hour to look for shards will, unless you are particularly lucky, result in no progress at all.

I don't want to get into the maths and mechanics of it all, since I'm not qualified to make these decisions, but I will say this - when I run mission after mission after mission and get nothing at all, I'm demotivated to keep trying. When it takes me weeks to achieve even the basic Boost when I can go from 49 to 50 in a couple of days with the same playstyle, and then thinking ahead at how EXPONENTIALLY more costly future Boosts will be is very demotivating. Then turning around and realising that if I'd just gotten on a kill-all ITF, I'd have gotten right around 15 Shards in an hour and a half makes me REALLY demotivated, because... I want to run missions by myself. What's the point of playing if the only meaningful progress to speak of is found in content I don't like?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

I'm not sure how to evaluate how unlucky you are because shards don't drop based on subscription time, but based on kills. If you've racked up fifty thousand kills in a month and a half, I'd say you were terribly unlucky. If you've only generated two thousand kills, you might even be ahead of the game. You could run herostats and start checking on the number of kills you make per session and over a week or month, and see if the drops per kill (which would be fuzzy because shard drop rates vary by rank) are unreasonably low. And you should be sure you're actually killing targets capable of dropping shards, which are basically targets level 50 and higher.

Thinking very conservatively, I'd expect a soloer running at base difficulty claering (or nearly clearing) missions such as newspaper or tip missions to be defeating 30-40 targets, plus some boss-type thing at the end (which could be scaled to an LT). Assuming an average of 35 minion targets only, and one LT on top, you should average one shard every 25 such missions. At a reasonable 15 minutes per mission, that's about 6 hours of play per shard. It takes 12 shard equivalents to craft a common alpha, and you're guaranteed one from Ramiel. Assuming you have enough vanguard merits to craft a Grai, that's 7 shards remaining or 42 hours of play. Assuming you start from zero, that's 11 shards remaining or 66 hours of play.

This is the floor. No one who teams will take this long. No one who plays at higher difficulty will take this long. No one whose missions actually spawn LTs will take this long. Only soloers who never team, never run at higher difficulty, never fight Lts in their missions except maybe at the end, don't have enough merits to craft a Grai, and average 15 minutes per standard mission will take this long on average.

Such a person would have also taken over ten hours to level from 49 to 50. And I should point out that if I make the more reasonable assumption that one in five targets is an LT, the time to level decreases by only a few percent, but the calculated shard rate more than doubles (cutting the earning times down to 17 to 26 hours).

I would be interested to see recorded statistics that imply a reasonable scenario generating a far lower shard drop rate than this.

Originally Posted by Blue_Centurion

I frankly do not care if they are specifically PvGod enhancers. There is no underlying logic in the world that justifies 2 billion per enhancer in this game economy. They can fix it or shove it as far as I am concerned.

Originally Posted by Chill_Out

I can only imagine you've never really had experience with corruptors. They are among the best solers in the game, assuming you do not take secondaries that rely on teams to be at their best, like /Pain. They were designed to 'pwn' as well as support, so please roll back the preconceptions of corrs as weak, mushy support priests.

...

If you go Pain, Thermal, Sonic, Trick Arrow, yeah.. you're gonna solo worse. But don't paint the whole AT with a broad brush, check out the other combos, you'll be pleasantly surprised.