Egos_Shadow

Depends how much money you want to spend.

You can throw in some cheap +Recharge sets (Doctored Wounds and Crushing Impact are quite affordable) and use Stupefy in Rise of the Phoenix. That's (with 5 CI/DW and Stupefy) 31.25% recharge for not too much inf.

If you want a LOT of extra recharge, or to try and softcap your defenses, be prepared to spend vast sums and do all kinds of weird slotting.

The problem I found with mine was... you're already a Fire/Fire Brute. What more do you really need?

You get the reward the first time you do each one (so, eventually, seven "1st time" rewards) and then the repeatable one 1/week.

Sadly I don't have a really good Incarnate guide I've used. I just beat my head against it until I woke up with a lot of abilities crafted. It's mostly like IOs, but with more levels. You get generic components which you craft into specific components, which you then craft into powers. These generic components are either Shards (for the Alpha ability) or Threads (for everything higher). With enough generic components (and occasionally inf) you can build anything eventually.

Grinding through trials is the fastest way, but you can somewhat slowly unlock the slots by buying Incarnate XP and bumping up Incarnate Shards. The Signature Story Arcs also give Incarnate salvage as rewards - doing each one once and picking the Threads option will (once all 7 are out there) give you 70 Threads, enough to build the first level of Destiny:Ageless (with 10 threads left over!).

Lambda Sector, Minds of Mayhem, the Underground and the Keyes Reactor all give Incarnate XP towards Destiny, so you can get a fair portion of the way there just doing each of them once (assuming that you're on a server that runs a variety of trials and doesn't just grind BAF/Lambda).

You can't beat grinding Lambda for efficiency if you want to unlock Destiny as quickly as possible though.

Those were alternate timelines, which are not entirely the same thing as alternate universes.

Comic book physics, what can you do right?

What's wrong with Cap'n Mako? Waterspout is unending hilarity and you get Hibernate too for when things go terribly wrong.

No, no. They just get sent to the Terminology Adjustment Facility (the lesser-known and much more pedantic version of the BAF).

"Zone meta-arcs" like they've been doing are always going to be terribly difficult to make compatible with villainy. Or, alternately, if they are, they're going to be incompatible with everything else.

It's hardly an issue with First Ward specifically so much as the thrust of the content in general.

And First Ward was pretty awesome but if you aren't a Praetorian to begin with you don't really have a dog in the fight. So some people in another dimension are fighting each other? The 5th Column and the Council shoot it up on the street corners *every day* back in Paragon. And back there I can punch the fail out of both of them at once until they stop.

Of course, part of the problem may be that the terminology is overloaded here. Villain in game means (given the things you engage in!) being willing to basically sacrifice everything in order to gain your objectives (which is to eat a power source larger than your head). If you had limits, you'd be a Rogue.

Just because you're evil is no reason to be impolite. Besides, if you're polite it's easier to bring people around to your way of thinking.

Yeah, you're never going to have themed minions or your own evil lair... unless you recruit a villain group and design their costumes and base for them. There's no way to actually carry out a villainous philosophy other than Arachnos' vague "conflict needs no reason, conflict is the reason".

It hardly even seems like there's room to be more of a punch-clock villain. I mean, sure, you've got to kill people when it's required for the job, but there's no reason to be a jerk to everyone, all the time. I've always felt vaguely bad that there's nothing villains will do for Thorn Slaves in Nerva or the people being Devoured in St. Martial, even if you stomp the spawns around them. Sure, rescuing people is for heroes, yadda yadda, but nobody deserves to be mind controlled or turned into a hideous monster unless I'm the one controlling them or it's my hideous monster.

But then I go on with whatever I was doing because, hey, people need killing. Those bills aren't going to pay themselves.

Somehow in my head this ended up with giving a GL ring to Stephanie Brown. Crossovertastic!

In the ear.

More obvious than One More Day? No More Mutants is just the same press of the reset button, for pretty much the same reasons. If you want to have stories where mutants are a rare and persecuted minority, you can't exactly have a massive, growing population of mutants out there forcing the world to deal with their existence. It undermines the Perpetual Now that the mainstream comic universes seem to enjoy.

Also, if you think mutants are allegories for various subculture groups, it has a wonderful scent of unintentional dark, dark irony.

"Reality Warping" isn't a power! It's an excuse for sloppy writing! It's answering "But how does that work" by screaming "A wizard did it!", all the time, forever!

%&@# the "reality warping" power and every character and author that has ever used it, ever, in the entire history of the medium! #@$& them in the ear!

*is dragged off in a straight jacket*

I think this thread would be a much better place if we all agreed with Mask of Many from last night and stopped making posts that imply that people are greedy or petulant. We definitely shouldn't follow the model of Mask of Many from a day ago. I mean, that comment was just completely out of line, as Mask of Many from last night points out.

While obviously nobody in this thread has a good handle on exactly what the whole playerbase would prefer on the number issue, if a large number of paying customers were to think that way, then, yes, that, alone, would be sufficient reason not to implement that system.

I'm just sayin'.

I'm sure that NCSoft has a better understanding of wether this is seriously a customer retention/acquisition issue. I assume it's one of the things that comes up in the unsubscribe survey...

Just think of the missed opportunity to have Logan as an awkward father figure, trying to explain that, you know, maybe a nice subtle black or blue might be a better color scheme if she wants to follow him around. And then, wackiness can ensue.

There's still no excuse for the Lupine thing.

"All of these people are fuzzy... they must be related! It's genius!"

Yeah, at some point you have to admit that a customer probably isn't ever going to come back. I know a ton of people who only played to kill time before WoW came out, and now languish forever in the eternal toil of that game. They were "day 0" customers, so they're probably the precise people we're talking about when we grumble about someone hogging Captain ExactlyTheNameYouWanted or whatever.

A couple of years back I finally got fed up with retcons and closed my file at the local comic book place, going to a "I'll buy the trade paperback... well, probably not actually" policy.

Hearing things like this convinces me that I made the correct decision.

Lupines? Really? Does Marvel Comics' mutant line exist for the sole purpose of convincing young, aspiring writers that, yes, they can in fact do better than people who are paid for it?

This is the comic book genre we're talking about, though. Shouldn't we be looking for Captain Codfish?

Well, once you realize that the experience they mean was probably the hours they put in playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance in the break room during lunch...

Yeah, I was kind of ambivalent when I first heard of the Other Game's intent to do this; it wasn't until I ran into it in play that I discovered how much I loathed the x@y format. I'd be hard pressed to pick a specific reason why it bugged me so much, but it certainly looks stupid.

I've always mentally mapped Law/Chaos and Good/Evil to "do you think rules are inherently positive" and "are you a d*ck". Arachnos may have rules and structure, but most anyone who thinks that they can get away with it will cheerfully violate them right up until the point someone more powerful catches them.