Kitsune9tails

Here is my personal thought about the well. I beleive it is established in the novel that the box that is the foundation of the well waters power actually collects energy over centuries then periodically grants that power to champions who become legends.

Of course the well is sentient and malevolent; it is us.

The power it collects is our dreams, our imaginations, our divine potential. That all goes to the box and waits for someone we deem worthy.

Everytime a person has a heroic impulse they quash or a villainous one they withhold, that defining moment doesnt just vanish, it goes to the well. All the world-changing, consciousness-raising books and songs you failed to write are in there with every time you thought about seriously killing that guy in traffic, all those closet monsters, waiting for someone heroic or villainous enough to physically free the power.

Then, guided by your subconscious mental template of whst a hero or villain is, it seeks out the existing people and things that most closely match, and tempts or imbues them with huge chunks of that power. The power of 6 billion divine souls concentrated into a few thousand people.

For me, in games, the essence of fun is interesting choices. That means a couple of things in this context; balance and difference. A 9 second cast time is fine so long as the other aspcts of the power make it overall as useful as many other powers with the same cost. If not, the power needs buffed or additional uses. As a last resort you can make it more like other powers by reducing downsides.

This applies to archetypes as well. Is there room to buff blasters? What should happen when a solo blaster meets a +0 x1 spawn, and how should that differ from the scrapper experience?

I disagree.

At no point does the story indicate that incarnates should be immune to pacification. Both story and gameplay are in sync. But the ability of the citizens to take us down is not clearly associated with the telepathists for some and just plain distasteful to others. I personally would be just fine with a better visual emanating from the telepathists or even some atmospheric text in a caption box spelling it out.

I'm not going to argue with any of your points except to say that you kind of have to pick a side; either the Devs should leave the old story potential abandoned or pick it up and develop it.

In spite of my reservations about the new Dark Astoria, I'd love to see them develop the stories you mentioned.

I'd like to see Praetoria go all the way up to 50 as well.

Not really.

I kind of feel like the game is going through it's own 'grim and gritty 80s' phase. The emphasis is more on action and plot, rather than a nebulous backstory that is full of potential. The focus is on what's happening NOW rather than setting up a world where anything could happen in the future. Storylines are being resolved (and retconned), rather than left hanging.

It's very interesting, and makes me wonder if it is a natural outgrowth of having an ongoing setting with multiple writers and editors on board.

I feel that this is a phase, and we will get through it just fine. I also feel that it is not all bad, and that the game can contain and benefit from both 'styles' of writing.

I love the story of Praetoria. It's a good story. What is unusual about it is that it seems we are heading to a definite ending rather than it being left as an open-ended place that is occaisionally updated forever.

There are an infinite number of alternate worlds beyond the Portals, and therefore an infinite number of stories that could be told that deeply, even disregarding the potential of the Shadow Shard. That's awesome. Similarly, we could finally delve as deeply into Crey Corporation, Hero Corps and other fixtures that have been around forever.

At the risk of splitting hairs, though, I think the writing may have outstripped the presentation. Things like having players not instantly comprehend the effect of the Telepathists is minor as an isolated incident, but I hope that it is a problem we can nip in the bud. I feel the same thing has happened with the Signature story arcs; IMHO those should be longer and more in depth, and written with more of a story about the various Phalanx members they are about, so that we can feel the great potential that seems to lie behind it.

The first SSA told us basically nothing about Synapse.

The second was much better, and we found out a lot about Numina and her dad, but not much was done to make us feel about the potential loss of Numina.

Then we have Miss Liberty go down without so much as throwing a token punch.

It feels like the writing staff has 'rebooted' somehow.

I would not put it that strongly.

City of was apparently designed to have teams occaisionally encounter spawns that were so dangerous, you were supposed to puzzle your way around or through them, rather than just power through.

This makes sense; even James Bond, Han Solo, and Superman occaisionally encounter things that make them use their brains rather than just charging in shooting, or use stealth and trickery.

Most players just avoid such situations entirely; if the team wipes, they lower their rep or drop the mission.

But there should still be tools for the minority that enjoys doing things 'the hard way' or 'the long way'.

The entire point of a powerset named Traps is that you set up traps for your enemy to blunder into. Although Bear Trap melee would be a fun powerset, that's a different powerset from Traps

Gadgets and Devices are similar concepts; you have a large variety of very different abilities, so that when you run into an outlier situation that you can't power through, you have something "for just such an occaision". That something should not always be a fast-charging crashless nuke.

There is nothing wrong conceptually with 'only as a way to start a fight' or 'pull the enemy into an ambush' type combat powers, so long as those powers are strong enough to balance the interrupt/animation times, which may no longer be the case (if it ever was).

Not all powers or powersets have to be designed or intended to be used in a situation where 30 minions are taking potshots at you.

Variety in character design and playstyles uber alles.

There is room in this game for brain-intensive battles with overpowering enemies. It just may not be the best fit with early Incarnate stuff ; and it ultimately will probably be somewhat less popular than TFs/SFs as a whole.

But the Devs can't win; if they had come out with button-mashing stuff for the early Incarnate content, people would have been saying they were unimaginative and wondering why we can't have cool bosses like in that one other game

And they have already upgraded the servers several times. I don't know how many enemies the engine/lower-end systems can throw at us at once before it becomes screenshot city before too many people, but I'd like to see a mission where that was the point maybe that's the Reichsman mission?

But I still beleive most of it is presentation; one ploy they can get away with a few times is the Godzilla Threshold. The situation is so bad, they are throwing their failed, too-dangerous-to-use stuff at us.

And please: destructible instanced environments. I want to go to a facility like the BAF, say, "knock knock" and literally blow the wall down.

We are all the writers of our own comics; the Devs are just the editors.

It is up to you to justify how the Seers get the cybernetic Impervium armor bonded to your skin to apparently stop working, just as it was up to you to decide that your Temporary Invulnerability was represented as Impervium armor in the first place.

This isn't about whethet the Seer debuff is justifiable; anything can be justified in a comic book setting from Squirrel Girl defeating Thanos to an entire race of superhumans who just happen to grow up in the one type of star system that denies them their powers, and simply choosing not to develop star travel.

IMHO, this is about what kinds of threats we want to be defeated by in Incarnate content going forward.

Let the TPN stand as a individual incident; stories and history are full of things that happened 'that one time'.

What we need is guidance for the writers as to what kinds of threats we will feel good losing to.

Like:

Super Robots
Angels
Fallen Angels
Angels that are Super Robots
Gods
Gods that are Super Robots
New Gods
Alien Battlecruisers
Fish
Other Incarnates

...and of course, little girls.

From wikipedia: