Liquid

In a year or two from now, at level 50, most people are likely going to have a better-than-blaster-tier-9 AoE attack, an AoE buff, and Praetorians for pets. They will also likely share other visible powers that we don't know about yet. (The Alpha slot and Interface slot are not relevant to this discussion, as they are not visible, or at least, Interface doesn't appear to be.)

In another thread, someone (leaving names out of this) said, regarding the Praetorian pets, "they're specific to an enemy faction and hard to sell as your OWN powers". The response was: "They aren't your powers. They are powers that you're taking (or being granted) from the Well of the Furies."

Last night, on one of Virtue's global channels, someone said something similar, that they didn't think they could pass the Lore slot off as their own abilities. The response was hostile and rude, and involved some swear words and laughing, but the important phrase used was: "You're not a special snowflake. You're an Incarnate."

I thought that was an interesting point. It does appear that, while there will be some minor differences, the end game system will make everyone more homogeneous. Back in the early beta of the game, it was changed from a free-form system to an AT system, because they found that everyone took the same powers. This led to a lack of diversity and "tank-mages". This thread isn't about tank-mages, but the diversity issue is what it is about, and I'm curious if people feel that Incarnates are showing that the devs think differently about the issue now. So, I have the following questions:

• How do you feel about the powers themselves based on the information that has been released so far, including in the sneak peaks and threads about them (here's a decent one, here's another, there are more), in terms of gameplay and how you feel about your characters having them (regardless of the lore)?
• How would you feel about your characters if everyone else had a significant number of extremely effective and visible powers that are similar or identical to yours? (If you are choosing to skip these powers, please instead say how you would feel about everyone else having the same or similar powers)
• How do you feel about the lore concept that Incarnate powers are not really yours, but granted by/stolen from an entity that has been stated to be insane (in the issue 20 overview)? How do you feel about your fellow heroes/villains being given/stealing these powers by/from that entity? If you plan to ignore the lore for your characters, go ahead and say so, but give your opinion on it too if you have one, please.
• Do you believe that character diversity is an important part of this game in general? If so, please say why, and from the information you have so far from the sneak-peaks or the threads about them, what impact do you feel the Incarnate system will have on that diversity, and the game as a whole? If not, why not?

Obviously feel free to expand on the topic in whatever ways you see fit.

Important note: this post is not just about the Lore slot. It's about Incarnates in general, and how everyone is going to share many extremely visible and powerful abilities at the end.

I want to express my gratitude for the fix to the respec trial badges, and the Villain TF covering the 30-35 level range. Thanks!

We have the best community ever!

I like the fact that Powers can function differently in PvP than in PvE, so that if a power is too powerful in one, it doesn't have to change in the other as well. There hasn't been a single complaint about powers being nerfed in one because of the other, since.

That's about all that I like about the current PvP experience (I didn't like it prior to I13 either, just FYI. I think there need to be more PvP minigames like CTF, and less PvE objectives placed in PvP zones, and there needs to be some way to balance the number of players on each side for zones).

Davis/Claremont's Excalibur was my favorite comic in the 80's. I didn't even bother reading what else was on the poll, I just found it and clicked it, because I loved it that much.

Too bad the fun only lasted for about 2 years before it started to suck.

Here are some additional issues that I think the average player has working against them:

1) They don't slot very well. They may not even slot with SOs. If they do, they may slot over the ED cap because they either don't know about it, or think (and I quote, when I explained it to one such person) "every little bit helps", when slotting some other effect or moving that slot to another power would help them more. They may even refuse to change when they do learn how ED works.

2) They don't use inspirations very well, or every often (my old roommate's insps were not in any order, and he'd just tap the F keys until he got something that helped).

3) They don't use powers tactically-- they just tap them in order as they come up against whichever target they picked first. They don't use their stun/hold on dangerous targets ASAP, they don't save Nemesis LTs for last, they don't attempt to knock down Paragon Protectors before they pop MoG, etc.

4) They don't use positioning tactically-- they stand in debuffs and sometimes even damage patches while fighting.

5) They think a power does something it doesn't do (or does it for longer, or some variation of this), and continue to use it in a very sub-optimal way. I still run into people that are otherwise capable of using their powers properly, but have Build Up on Auto.

I know multiple people that fall in one or more of these categories. I know some people that do one or more of them some of the time, but not all of the time. All of these people are awesome people, and great fun to team with. Most of them would probably have quit if the game had been as hard as Praetoria is at release, and never played any other MMO, and never would play any other MMO. CoH originally drew a new group of people to it that were not MMO players, and I think it was specifically because of how it differs from other MMOs.

We need John McClane vs Aliens.

They should make another movie like The Expendables, but actually use the characters instead of just the actors. I don't care how they do it, I want to see John McClane, Ellen Ripley, Captain Kirk, and Sarah Connor teamed up with Jack Burton as comic relief. The storyline could be that a group of terrorists that have taken over Weyland-Yutani tower discover that Lo Pan has supplanted the CEO and ressurected Khan Noonien Singh to lead a cybernetic Xenomorph army, and only one man... I mean wom... I mean 5 people can stop them.