Necrotech_Master

the most suprising thing to me is that they almost ignored the apex/tin mage stuff

those things ARE incarnate content, but they are treated barely above a regular tf

making tin mage and apex drop threads and award components in a way similar to the trials would solve many problems (not a solo route, but for those who dislike trials)

eliminating shards altogether is prolly what the solo route needs right now, on normal tfs just get rid of the shard component reward and add in random common thread component (to make it fair you would not be able to choose)

other than that, my experience with the non trial path matches Billz experience in that it is ridiculously slow and the fact that the shard to thread conversion rate is pitifully awful (since a 10:10 conversion is actually losing 80% value)

i completely agree with Bill on this, i have farmed the hell out of incarnate trials to get the shinies on my main (i had t3s in all slots within 2 days of i20 release), but once i finished him off i tried to run a few more toons through the trials but the grind just started to feel like a grind since it was the same 2 trials just on different toons

although we have a new one, the keyes trial IMO was badly designed at some parts because the main strategy is "herd an AV around and heal or GTFO" and i very much dislike it which means i have the 2 same trials

the toons that i have not been running through the trials (well i ran through enough to get a few slots unlocked) and they have around 1-2 tier 1 unlocked of only interface and judgement, one of them is a fairly decent farmer but he still has not gotten enough stuff to even get a tier 2 yet because he hasnt been running the trials

the bigger problem with shards and threads IMO is the fact that 1 shard is worth 5 threads

1 common shard component is 4 shards
1 common thread component is 20 threads

hence 1 shard should be equal to 5 threads, so we are actually getting majorly jipped on the shard to thread conversion

if the shard to thread conversion was changed to make it an equal change it would be 10 shards for 50 threads, which is almost enough for a tier 1

those 50 threads per conversion would also go a long ways to help unlock the slots too since you need 150 threads by themselves if you never plan on running any trials


in summary the best thing they could do is change the conversion around to be more fair to solo players

the once per 20 hour conversion should be 10 shards:50 threads
the free unlimited conversion should be 10 shards:10 threads

for those who waited and forked out a little bit of inf they would be getting the exact same cost of threads for the amount of shards they converted, for the person who wanted to get it done now, they would be taking the massive conversion penalty that we have now which is saying oh im taking these 10 shards and converting them into 1/5 of the power in threads

on victory its been roughly 40% BAF and 40% lambda with 20% keyes because its kind of a toss up as it seems roughly mixed in the number of poeple who like and hate it

i personally dont mind all of the random stuff that happens when fighting antimatter, alpha/beta entanglements are literally hardly noticeable especially if your ranged and they chahge so frequently you cant just choose who you want to be near

the obliteration beam targeting patch is kind of hard to notice at times especially when it aims for someone right near antimatter, with all the pets and antimatters own powers being the same dang color as it is hard to avoid, its also impossible to avoid the beam during the retarded "freeze time" segments

he can always just instantly tp to the consoles like reichsman does with his machine and be rid of the entire freeze time thing

the only part that i extremely hate in this trial is the dang antimatter pulse, any toon without a fast charging self heal is basically screwed since it takes % of your hp off each hit and with only 30 sec between pulses not enough time to really regen it

this pulse should start out with resistable dmg and add in unresistable dmg when you are hurting antimatter since he is supposed to be losing control of it


so my final thoughts on this are:

-change the pulse so it doesnt screw over non healing powersets
-remove the freeze time and just make antimatter automatically tp to the healing things
-if the above 2 were fixed the badge requirements would not be half bad as they are now

i have to agree that either shards or threads were a mistake, it should not have been split, they should have stuck threads from beginning or kept shards in the trials, but not split between both as it does make the system several times more complex

how they designed the alpha with the shards was very good, how they designed the threads and the bazillion new components, not so much and its even worse that its completely separated from the rest of the content

keyes gives xp for alpha, judgement, lore, interface, and destiny

we will prolly not see the other 5 incarnate slots for at least a few more issues till they push more content through

i doubt they are getting rid of the praetorian tutorial, they are however gonna basically limit the current hero and villain tutorials into ouro so its still possible to get jailbird and isolator

kin pretty good with archery and DP, not so much for AR

the only reason i dont like it with any of those is due to constant redraw

rejoining through the LFG tab does work, i had to use it at least twice yesterday, i think that issue got fixed when they did the emergencey maintenance on the global server which is why global chat and stuff was down for a few hours

from what ive been hearing the invite to league during a trial appears to be broken which could be something thats limiting this as well

im fairly sure its in addition to, kind of a way to promote the new lowbie experience since they are completely redoing basically the tutorial and lvl 1-8 zones

i was in 3 trials yesterday and we were always open leagues so we basically sat around for 5 min then popup came up, i dont think we ever had anyone from queue join us and we still got the free astral for being open league

one question, for the not destroying terminals do you basically have to let him heal up to full each time? that shouldnt be too bad if you have a buff/debuff heavy team since the primary dmg is disintegration and obliteration beam with all the aoe buffs and destiny powers going off

the polar lights look more like variants of the vet buff wisp pets, the boss ones are red and LT/support are blue IIRC

its possible that it could be a text error and should be AND instead of OR

still, gratz on those badges already Beef lol

the only mechanic i dislike in the keyes trial is the antimatter pulse, its another deal with unavoidable unresistable dmg but it hits the entire league