IanTheM1

Have you done any of the recent villain content? Especially Mortimer Kal (or at least his special tip mission)?

I would think quite the opposite - Prometheus might have something interesting to say to those who have previously stolen some of his power.

Yeah, this is a case where the marketing machine and everything had some really bad timing. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, because making it a choice between Incarnate Merits and Paragon Points would be an excellent, excellent compromise.

But ours is called War Witch...

At that point why not just go whole hog and say she comes from Praetorian Cimerora? I still want to know if there's a Praetorian Ouroboros...

If you look closely you can see a protective forcefield around MoM (totally called that, by the way). And besides, what better place to train the backbone of Cole's regime by subjecting them to the horrors of the Devouring Earth? Either they become a good little Seer like Mother wants, or, well, accidents happen...

Some previous posts by Zwill have implied that the VIP server will have special features. Not necessarily content, but something that the others do not get.

Comment?

Devouring Earth infected Seers. You may begin screaming...now. (Very Half-Life-esque. I like.)

Also don't forget the Carnival of Light.

Indeed, that was one of many points I was communicating! Reading really does open up a world of adventure!

The other night I ended up on a Lambda trial that was almost perfectly 50/50 Incarnates and non-Incarnates.

While I won't deny there were more factors at work than just Incarnate powers, it was telling that the grenade team, which had all of the Incarnates sans myself (a Dark/Stone Brute, so I couldn't exactly act as a strong trailblazer), completely destroyed that phase in the time it took my team to get two acids, at which point they transferred over and finished it off for us.

They can't do what you want them to do.

The choice between damage and secondary effect in Judgement exists because several entirely separate Judgement powers exist and they exist in a system designed to have modularity.

Edit: Also, the idea of trading knockback for damage raises the question of how it'd be balanced against Fire Blast. (Boy, I never thought I'd see an instance where I'd be defending Fire Blast's damage.)

I'd be tempted to agree with this, but considering how unwieldy the AI on some escorts is, that seems a bit too far.

Already fixed in 20.5.

Mission one, change it so that you simply have to save Penny and then defeat the Clockwork King. I don't really have an issue with the third mission as it stands. It's been some time since I've done Lady Grey, but I don't recall it being that tedious. Especially since you're given two helper NPCs to help blow through the map.

It's a bit strange that these missions haven't been addressed when these shortcuts are very reminiscent of the old Katie Hannon speed tricks.

If only. But that would give marketing and most likely corporate a heart attack.

Unfortunately you're way late on that point. Honestly I don't think there's ever been a time when one side of the forum wasn't at another's throat for some reason.

And I'd too like to get back to actual debate, but alas, most of what gets thrown around nowadays are glib responses or pathetic strawmen filled with logical flaws and fallacies.

So don't grind trials, grind shards instead?

They also seemed to be caught off-guard by the push for solo Incarnate content and fully admitted it was a ways off.

Actually, it'll still feel like a grind months from now, because the Trials themselves are grindy and dull. And all of the teaming metagame hoops you have to jump through are also dull. We'll see if that latter part changes with the tweaks to the TUT in 20.5.

I've started making my own fun by betting on exactly when I'm going to crash in a given Trial. Because this long after launch I still crash, guaranteed, at least once per two trials. If not for that, I might have at least a slightly sunnier disposition about the trials and would be willing to approach them more often.

Frankly it seems like they're working as fast as they can to strong arm players into grinding even more trials.

While I don't strictly agree or disagree with the suggestion, this line of reasoning just doesn't work. Ninjas and Mercs getting access to some new IO sets simply does not address balance problems in the sets in the slightest thanks to IOs being optional.

There are far more companies, stores, and restaurants in Primal Earth than there are in Praetoria.

Because there's never been noticeable performance problems during iTrials...

He said just Atlas, not the entire server.

Player costumes are dense chunks of data. We're not talking graphical lag, we're talking bandwidth, and clogging it up by continually transmitting costume swaps.

I will say, I've never heard of the event Roderick is referencing (or at least, never heard mention of it on the boards until now), but we've been explicitly told in the past that the timer is there due to performance concerns.

With how the writing's been going so far concerning the whole Incarnate plot, I wouldn't necessarily bet on that. And then it wouldn't feel shallow so much as contrived. Either way, I wasn't referring to the story justification, but the gameplay.

Newspaper missions are semi-modular, AFAIK. They're nowhere on the scale of what you're suggesting, no, but my point was that newspaper missions are boring and repetitive even when they're semi-randomized. Sure, it'll maybe take longer to burn out on this particular iTrial, but eventually you'll either get stuck with a bunch of parts you don't like a few too many times or finally see all of them at which point the interest will start fading.

And from what it sounds like, this trial brings nothing unique other than its randomness. That's not a compelling hook.

I still get raid teams that don't understand "check temp power list; use acids on portals". My point is that depending on how it's designed, you're either making it too dull for me or too hard for them.

Case in point. Tower defense CoH was one of the more interesting things they've done, and it might very well be my favorite part of the BAF, horrible server-choking lag aside.

All this is personal opinion, granted. So I'll also break down the technical side of things.

I like the idea of using different methods of acquisition for each one, but how are these distributed across the league? Does everyone get to summon Statesman or just whoever frees him?

And how large would these sub-maps be? While they wouldn't be drawn all at once thanks to being placed underground like other sub-maps presumably, I worry if having five such maps of appreciable size, hidden or not, possibly causing a performance issue. Though speaking of, having to place five sub-maps inside of every possible main raid map would be a bit of work.

Which five groups? Why are the Praetorians working with non-Praetorian groups?

This part is fine, I guess. But would these be the basic AV versions or the souped-up TF/raid versions?

Why would these guys be getting involved in the first place? It'd be one thing if for some reason the raid is taking place in Dark Astoria and you bump into Adamastor, but it's random...

Also, of that list of 16, problems arise:

- For obvious reasons, Sally should not be part of that group.
- Unless you're fighting in the water or near the water, Lusca should not be part of that spawn group.
- Similarly, if you're nowhere near Sharkhead, Ghost of Scrapyard.
- Kraken is pretty remarkably underpowered for an GM, to the point where he's soloable, if I'm not mistaken.
- I'd have similar concerns for Paladin and Babbage.

That's my other lingering problem, anyway: "And then an AV attacks!" is honestly quite the non-threat to a team of eight, let alone a full league, and even moreso thanks to all of the Incarnate goodies. The whole reason for complex mission goals are to actually challenge Incarnates and justify giving them so many crazy, unique powers.

I think turning in costume salvage has a chance of either spawning a zombie invasion or a banner event. Otherwise, that's about it.

But considering this is meant to be a an alternate source of Astral merits and Threads, it feels very, very wrong to have it triggered by the iTrials or TFs. Going with the Trials, either it would spawn way too many Incursions, which would burn people out on the event much, much faster or it would spawn far too few in the non-prime time hours of a given server. Going with a timer keeps it fair to everyone and anyone regardless of what time they play at.