Obitus

That might be a nice gesture, but I really don't even think that's the problem in this particular case. The Incarnate powers' interface is probably the main problem, followed by the absolute lack of clear naming conventions for components.

The fact that there are two separate and distinct baseline currencies is almost irrelevant, because one of them is only useful for Alpha, which most of us probably had squared away before I-20 even launched. You can convert shards to threads, but that's as far as shards go with respect to the new content.

The devs clearly want Alpha to be more generally accessible than Interface through Lore. They want progress in the later slots to be limited (largely) to people who run the Trials. You can debate whether theirs is the right approach to gating progress, but that's probably a subject for a different thread. The false-complexity issue would remain even if there were no Shards.

I don't have Mids' installed in front of me right now, but if you look under options (I think it's called 'Configuration' in the Mids' menu), and then you go to 'Effects and Maths' there should be an area near the bottom where you can adjust the base chance to hit.

For +4s, that's 39. For +3s (off the top of my head) that's 48.

If you type in those numbers and select Okay, then all of your powers' ToHit will be calculated on that base. (Visible in the info window when you right-click on a power).

Venture's spot on.

Flavor is great, but the Incarnate crafting system is only complex to the extent that the devs seem to have gone out of their way to punish you for the smallest and gameplay-meaningless mistakes. You shouldn't need to consult with an out-of-game checklist every time you get a reward table, for fear of picking up the wrong component.

Complexity is fine, if -- as Arcanaville pointed out -- that complexity provides interesting choices. That's not what we have here. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've wasted a couple of components because on occasion I've lulled myself into using the spectacularly unhelpful Incarnate crafting interface to figure out what I needed. And misread it.

Those mistakes have nothing to do with gameplay. They're just a waste of players' time.

Yeah, tray management is like half the game, IMO.

Personally, I try to put attack-chain powers (the powers I most often spam) in slots 1-5, with 5 usually being an AoE effect of some sort. Then tilde (the key to the left of 1) gets a supplemental power that I often spam. On my Dom, for example, that's Confuse.

Other powers that I might find handy to use without having to find them with a mouse click go on tray 2 from numbers 1-5. That way, I can just press Alt+1 for Mass Hypnosis (for instance). 10-11 powers are easily accessible with my left hand while the right most often rests on the mouse. Toggles and lower priority powers go in slots beyond 5 or in the third tray. Really low-priority powers (temps and teleports) go in trays 4 and 5.

I'll also toss an emergency-esque power on button4, which is the back button on the side of my mouse. In the case of my Dominator, that power is Mass Confusion.

Basically everything else gets the manual click treatment. For what it's worth, here's a picture of my current layout (keeping in mind that the two cleared spaces on tray 1 are for Lambda-trial temp power drops; ordinarily those would be filled):

Picture

I thought so, but I also wanted to be sure I was fair, given that I wasn't sitting in front of the game at the moment.

Yup.

The above-quoted post 1,000%.

The reason I originally registered on the forums was basically to campaign for MA, back in May of 2004. I did that for a long while, and though the set did see some fairly large improvements in the early life of the game (not due to my campaigning, mind), I gave up after awhile. Arcanaville has pointed out MA's flaws far more effectively than I ever did ever since.

And the set has seen even more improvements, I think largely as a result of her efforts, in recent years.

But MA is still, at best, a stylishly mediocre melee attack set. Haven't paid much attention to all the number-crunching work you guys have been doing in Scrapper land lately, but I'd be shocked if MA rated higher than about third-to-last in its presumptive specialty, single-target damage. Martial Arts is, to me, a monument to the sometimes mystifyingly disproportionate weight the development team has always placed on certain effects. MA has a lot of control in theory, but it seriously lacks for useful control.

But hey, I guess we can all hang our hats on the fact that disorient no longer gives staggering NPCs superspeed.

TL;DR: There's certainly nothing wrong with liking a powerset, but the OP's premise -- that there's no reason to play anything other than MA -- struck me as hilarious in a morbid kind of way. Heck, I'm not convinced this thread isn't an ingenious attempt at reverse psychology.

I went with the other branch of the Lore Seer tree, so maybe that explains why I have a completely different experience: Using the T3 Seers with the buff Lieutenant, I've never seen either of them even attempt to close to melee.

In comparison with what I'm reading about Victorias, the Seers damage ain't very good (added about 70 DPS to a Pylon run on my Dominator), but the Augur does have some control ability and a rare damage type. Absolutely PWNed Elite Boss Statesman in a Mayhem mission, for what that's worth.

For a Scrapper, I'm a bit torn. I know that people like to see their DPS number skyrocket, but for general purpose play I'm not sure it isn't better to diversify. As you point out, the pets are only available 1/3rd of the time, so there's an argument to be made that the pets are more like a quasi-panic button than they are a DPS supplement. The Seer tree seems to be one of the best options along those lines. Then again, the DEF component in the Seer buff pet's Fortitude doesn't stack with positional DEF, so that's worth considering.

Will have to experiment more with other Lore pets. Not sure yet what to take on my Tanker. He doesn't have an obvious thematic fit.

Heh, true. I'm probably being too nitpicky. If you were to take two turns -- one with the pet, and one without -- then you'd have a decent idea of what you're capable of doing. That thread is basically a catch-all at this point, and a lot of the things posted in there are just for fun.

That's true, and if the Rebirth Core offered +HP in commensurate amounts with the +regen available from Rebirth Radial, then the former would be more attractive.

But it really doesn't. The lowest (permanently sustainable) regen buff Radial offers is +200%. That's basically 8 Regenerative Tissue procs. The average +regen buff Radial offers is +433%. That's much higher than you can get from IOs, or even from most +regen powers.

Dispari's guide shows +HP numbers from an undisclosed AT's version of the power, so I can't assume they're accurate for Tankers (who have the highest HP in the game). Still, we're talking about a comparatively minor sustainable +HP boost, easily achievable through IO bonuses if you were so inclined. For instance, Dispari's numbers show Rebirth Core Epiphany at +53.54 HP for the last 60 seconds of the duration.

Even if we assume that that number is tripled on a Tanker, we're only looking at ~160 extra HP, permanently sustainable. That's less than 10% of base Tanker HP (~1875 IIRC, capping at 3534).

I'd say that if you're playing a build that doesn't need the +regen, then you're almost certainly better off with Barrier or Ageless than you are with Rebirth Core. Frankly, I'm not sure there's any AT or build out there for which the +HP branch of the Rebirth tree is a competitive option.

Some people have already gotten below one minute

Still, the Lore-included DPS figures in that thread seem a little beside the point to me. Once you've gotten the Pylon down below the five minute duration of the pets, you're no longer measuring the average contribution of the pets. It's almost as if someone tried to measure his DPS using only the 10-second duration of Build Up. Lore is basically long-duration burst damage, because the pets are only available 1/3rd of the time.

That said, the numbers people are pulling with Lore pets and buggy Ion Judgement are hilariously impressive. But all of the above is a bit off-topic, so I'll stop here

The bottom line is that you can do some pretty impressive things with any AT, given a lot of time tweaking and a lot of influence to invest -- but every build has to make trade offs.

There's a limit to how much responsibility anyone bears for someone else's hardware deficiencies. If you ask nicely, I'm sure most people would be willing to shut off their more gaudy toggles for you, but the first, most reasonable and polite step for anyone with a low-end computer is to adjust their own settings first, before expecting everyone else to accommodate him.

So much of this thread seems to circle around a middle ground in which I think most people here would agree. I guess it's just more fun to create extremes to knock over, though.

But I'd be lying if I said it didn't make for a fun read.

For what little it's worth, my only two Very Rares came when I was leading the League and typing a fair bit. Oddly enough, one of them came on a BAF when my team didn't even touch the reinforcements at all. (I had structured the League so that all the people who still needed iXP were in the adds team.) Leading is rare for me; guess I just don't like the feeling of responsibility.

Then again, I've been playing a fairly high-damage, AoE-capable character (Mind/Fire/Fire Dominator). Up past 30 runs now and only one Common, btw.

Maybe I'll run some Hero Stats tomorrow. Interesting stuff in this thread.

Aww. That sounds like an awesome CoV contact.

Course, it'd have to be pretty darn charming to sway me away from Television.

Yeah, the downside is that he has to eat it through a straw.

Barrier's cooldown is 2 minutes, not 90 seconds. At Tier 4 (Barrier Core Epiphany) you can get the duration up to 120 seconds -- basically permanent, with a tiny gap for the activation -- but the buff is really pretty weak for 90 of those seconds.

10 seconds of godmode (+90% DEF/RES), 20 seconds of very good protection (+32.5% DEF/RES), and then you're looking at 30 seconds at 7.5% RES/DEF, and the remaining 60 seconds at 5% DEF/RES.

Kelenar already handled this quote admirably (and with a fancy chart, no less!), but just to reiterate: layered mitigation isn't always better than one-dimensional mitigation just because its layered. 45% DEF (in non-Incarnate content) is 90% damage mitigation. 32.5% DEF/RES works out to 1 - ((1 - 0.65) * (1 - 0.325)) = 76%ish mitigation.

Granted, most people will have some DEF on which to stack Barrier, so you may well find that the latter, layered option is better in practice for a lot of teams. Then again, the higher-order DEF buff from the Force Fielder gives you better protection from ToHit buffs and DEF debuffs. In any case, as noted earlier, we're only talking about 32.5% RES/DEF for 20 seconds out of every 120.

I'm sure most people on the forum would agree that Force Field is an underwhelming powerset, or at least that it's too one-dimensional. That was pretty much the consensus even long before Incarnates were announced. Heck, it may have been the consensus even before Inventions came along and gave everyone the opportunity to add lots of DEF to their builds. But a single Barrier doesn't come close to replacing a fully matured FF build's contribution to team survivability. Stacked Barriers? Sure, I'll buy that.

Consider what the devs are trying to do here, though. For perhaps the first time in this game's long history, they're emphasizing multi-team content. It's important that people can at least make a good-faith attempt at these trials without spending hours trying to create the perfect mix of teams. Blurring the lines through Incarnate powers achieves that goal, and I think it does the job rather admirably.

As above with Barrier, you're gonna have hard time making the case that any singular instance of this-or-that Incarnate power replaces a given build or AT. Comparing Barrier with FF is probably the best example you could pick given that FF is such a one-trick pony, in fact. That said, the Incarnate abilities are designed so that if they're layered effectively, you can succeed -- even succeed with flying colors -- with any old collection of ATs/powersets.

I think that's a good thing, in a game that has traditionally shied away from starkly defined team roles (the holy trinity, if you will). Concept and uniqueness are double-edged swords, after all: the more mechanical uniqueness you enforce in the name of letting your players feel special, the less wiggle room you allow your players with respect to succeeding with whatever unique character concept they want to play.

Heh, it is funny how things change over the years, ain't it?

For what it's worth, in 20+ Trial runs -- of which only about five were BAFs, because the low population on Triumph seems to favor Lambda at the hours I tend to play -- I've gotten one Very Rare component, five or six Rares, one Common, and all the rest Uncommon.

The one Common was on a Master-of-BAF attempt that went bad after our League messed up the timing for killing the two AVs, a raid in which I spent most of my time lagging out and running from the hospital. (You know the 9CUs are out of hand when you have Rise of the Phoenix and ~170% in global recharge and you die twice in every cooldown cycle.) That was almost certainly my worst run in a personal-contribution sense.

All of the above occurred on a Mind/Fire/Fire Dominator, which isn't exactly an AoE specialist, but it ain't no slouch either. As you say, a small sample size. Everyone I talk to seems to agree that Commons are anything but common, though.

I've done the same thing. Getting iXP on BAF when your team is not on the ambush team is painfully slow. In any case, I figure that tossing the occasional AoE control and damage power at the adds can't hurt anyone.

Ideally, the League lead would determine ahead of time which player on each team is both well-suited for reinforcement duty (good AoE damage and/or control), and isn't crucial for AV duty -- and then assign those players to the adds so that every team got a roughly equal amount of Threads/iXP.

Heck, the guy's flair for action sequences might help Superman a lot, considering that most of the action sequences we've seen from Superman in film have been variations on Superman versus heavy object.

Heh, thanks. The only problem with the sleep trick is that if the boss uses an AoE attack near his buddies, he'll wake 'em all up and then the AI will no longer give the Chamber/Crate target priority.

I can usually get a good bit of extra damage on the crate with that method if I confuse a Vicky, though. War Walkers and the IDF guys have too much AoE.

Keep Terrify/Total Dom/Mass Confusion in your back pocket, regardless