Samuel_Tow

That's a pretty good writeup, actually. Some of those powers are inherently godly and a bit out of place (precognition), but for the most part, these seem like the kinds of abilities I'd give to a person who fought his way into god-like powers without being a literal god.

If I had to define the status of a "self-made god" with a single word, that would be "prestige." These are the people whom the story should treat with reverence and who should always come off like badasses whether they win or lose. Beating an Incarnate shouldn't be a curb-stomp battle, like Marauder just stomping his foot and *poof* 20 of them get squashed flat. Even when an Incarnate loses, it should be a big deal and a great source of pride for whoever defeated him.

A big thing that I DON'T want to see is Incarnates being treated as cannon fodder. There's no point in earning the power of the gods if your enemies earned it ten times over and they still squash you like a bug. That's not godlike power. That's god damn suck. At least once in this game, I want the narrative to stop trying to invent threats that are so much bigger than us and let us be the biggest, baddest, most awesome thing around. There are ways to challenge the gods without being stronger than them in single combat.

I look at it this way. As long as I have a steady source of threads that can grow visibly (as in, at all) after the completion of a single mission of after the defeat of a couple dozen enemies, speed isn't really all that important. I know I'll get enough Threads to make my components eventually, so all that's left is watching their number grow as I would watch my experience bar creep along. That's really all I've ever asked out of the Incarnate system - give me some sort of progress I can watch.

Shards just ain't it. I get one Shard per day, and that's if I'm lucky. I rarely end a mission with a Shard in my inventory. Gaining progress through Shards isn't even like watching grass grow. It's like watching the sky hoping to see a shooting star. They're rare drops, not a form of progress.

So long as Dark Astoria 2 offers me consistent, visible progress through enemy defeats, I'll be happy enough to clear all my missions of enemies.

I have a problem with this interpretation, and it's probably based on my status as a more or less average player in a game that hosts some truly remarkable ones. Yes, our characters had the speciality of their ATs, but that really isn't a reason to shine for. All this requires is someone else playing your AT better on the same team to show you how not special you are. Hell, half the time all it takes is someone with enough Hamidon enhancements or Inventions or a very good selection of seemingly useless powers to make another AT not specialised in your field show up your specialist character.

Being shown up by other characters in-game neither interests me nor bothers me, and I don't say this to be dismissive. As far as I'm concerned, we are all the stars of our own stories, and when we team, other people are just supporting actors. That doesn't mean I want to lord my "superiority" over other people who are just as much the stars of their own stories, but more to say that I don't compare numbers with my peers. That's not interesting. When we team, what matters is we get the job done. It's when there's no-one else to help that I actually care about how I perform and that's when I start taking pride in my characters.

Realistically speaking, the problem isn't with the system - at least not a problem that's solavable - but rather with the storytelling that makes use of the system. Dump 24 Incarnates in the same instances and you damn well have to make the game cheat to challenge them. Moreover, since you have to be fair to everyone, you can't make any of them shine. It's a basic rule of computer gaming that for a happy player base, you can't afford to step on one player for the sake of making another feel good, at least not in a cooperative environment. It's also a basic rule of gaming that the computer has no feelings and it's OK to step all over that to make the player feel special. We can, in other words, be allowed to humiliate the NPCs in order to build our egos, if only the stories were designed to let us do that.

I have a confession to make - I'm not terribly interested in "roles" or diversity, especially when my characters are as defined by what they can't do as they are by what they can. That's one reason I've never been bothered by the tank-mage concept. If it can shoot, punch, defend and heal... All the better. That just means I'm not missing anything. As such, I honestly feel no need to mess with the system. And if I DID see a need to mess with it, I wouldn't mess with it to make ATs more unique so much as to make the powers with which they break their roles better tooled to the roles they aim to break.

As I said - I'm not interested in how characters stack up against each other so much as how they stack against the environment, a sort of independent view on what is otherwise PvP-by proxy in a PvE environment. I don't aim to outdo my peers, I aim to be able to do my missions. So long as I can do that, I'm happy. Incarnates, with this in mind, would give me enough power to do harder missions, and do them with more style, as well as giving me added utility with which to break a few rules and avoid a few time sinks. Because I'm an Incarnate and I'm awesome

See, I think we're thinking in two completely different directions. Before I accepted the main drive behind Incarnates, I used to feel the same way. In my opinion, there's one central aspect we simply have to accept when dealing with not just Incarnates in this game, but with gods and godlike powers in general (well, in fiction, at least) - there are no specialist, there are only generalists. That's kind of the point. A specialist is strong in part because he focuses on one aspect, but also because he EXCLUDES a number of other aspects, thus having more "points" to "spend" on his speciality. This is the fundamental limitation of all so-called balanced characters.

In my eyes, once you become a god, this is the first limitation that should go. You are no longer defined by NOT being able to do something at all or only having the most basic pointless skills in it. As a god, you should be able to travel and punch and shoot and summon minions and not die and know lots of secrets. That, more than anything else, is what sets godlike beings apart from the rest of us, especially those at least somewhat balanced against the more common folk. A new god may not be that much more powerful at shooting lighting than the world's strongest Electricity Blaster, but he can shoot lighting AND punch with lightning AND defend with lighting AND teleport with lightning AND read people's minds with lightning AND make golems out of lightning AND heal from lighting, just off the top of my head.

Our characters are limited by the constraints of practicality, as expressed by game balance. There isn't enough time in the day to be good at everything. A god shouldn't be limited like this. A god SHOULD be good at everything, and possibly GREAT at a few things, too. "I can do everything you can do, as well as so much more." A god should be the kind of combatant who can scrap it out with the fighter, win a firefight with the ranger, match magics with the wizard and backstab the thief, because he's something more. It's a power fantasy taken up to 11, but not by making one aspect pointlessly strong while still leaving the god weak and vulnerable to another, but by making that god that much more well-rounded. All of our ATs are designed to miss something, and in so doing identify themselves. By no longer missing that something, I dare say they are thus redefined as gods.

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I have another example, actually: Hellsing's Alucard. No, he's not a god, but he's still an overpowered mess. He's functionally immortal up to and including letting Andersen cut his head off for kicks, he's immensely dangerous either through his absurd guns or his dark powers, he can transform into monsters, he can summon minions, he can teleport and walk through walls, he can control people's minds and from what I can tell, and from what I can tell he never loses his evil grin. AND he always shows up in a red coat, a wide-brimmed hat and scary shiny glasses even when blown to bits the previous scene. No, he's not a literal god, but with as much power as he has... He might as well be.

That's what I want for my characters, too - the ability to treat ordinary dangers with an air of bored bemusement, confident that no matter what your enemy does, you have the abilities necessary to counter it well before it becomes a danger. That's actually something I wish we had more often in City of Heroes - missions which are intentionally written in storyline to be easy. The missions themselves don't have to have a lower difficulty as long as the narrative tells of how you had it all under control and your enemies never had a chance.

I find it a profound misunderstanding of what godlike power should "feel" like, in my opinion, to try and come up with ever greater challenges to make us feel even more feeble than before we had this. In words and numbers, we have more power, but to me at least, it feels like we're weaker because our enemies got ten times as much as we did. Godlike power "feels" the most obvious when we can use it to overpower enemies clearly our inferior with, enemies who would have been problematic before. That, in my eyes, is what godlike power should be used for the most often.

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Again - all that means is I expect Incarnates to be less sepcialised and more broadly capable, to have abilities of all types and all kinds. Why they have this is an exercise for the owner of the character to explain, so long as we have these. Our Incarnate characters should not be limited by things they can't have, because there should be nothing gods can't have. Difficulty is one thing, but outright lack of a certain ability, that I don't think is applicable.

This notion more or less informs all the others I've listed.

It's a disaster from my perspective because it means a few things:

1. You can never have long missions because people would have a hissy fit. If only the end matters, then mission length is nothing but an obstacle. And I like long missions.

2. It means that teaming for Incarnate content - and despite being called "solo," I'm sure this will support teams as well - will mean I waste the time of my team-mates by insisting we fight fights instead of skipping them. I have a couple of people that I often team with, and I don't want to waste their time. Right now, we can kill-all every mission and not bat an eye because while it may be slower, each defeat still brings progress.

3. The promise that we will be able to make progress by street sweeping which has been made makes no sense if there is no progress awarded for enemy defeats.

I wouldn't mention this if it weren't mentioned officially. I couldn't provide a quote, obviously, but this has been stated as a goal for the queue. You're right that no timeline for it has been given and it's unlikely that the two changes will coincide, but the development team has stated - and to my reading done so in no unambiguous terms - that they want to make the turnstile work from within an instance if the can sort out the coding behind it.

I would assume solo Incarnate content would provide progress for the duration of its missions, such as for enemy defeats, rather than just for accomplishing the tasks. Putting progress solely on tasks and never on the process of accomplishing those tasks is a recipe for disaster and will do nothing more than see the arcs rushed and repeated ad nauseum to such an extent that someone like me will be wholly and entirely unable to team with other people. I get that giving progress to enemy defeats may just see missions farmed, instead, but at least we'll get to DO something in them.

Wanting people to commit is a bad idea, because you essentially leave people who are so-so and, especially, people who don't want to wait out in the cold. If your proposition is either I commit or I don't run Trials at all, then my response is I will simply never run Trials at all, because I do not commit to my games. I'll run a TF and stick it out to the end, but only once it's started and largely as a favour to my team-mates, but I refuse to make a commitment to run a task that I don't know will even start.

Force people to choose, and people will choose to not bother, just as they are doing now. Give people the chance to make a non-committal agreement and you'll find they'll live up to their agreement regardless more often than not.

If the word bothers you, then swap it for another. I don't mind using "god" but for the mythological and religious implication, if it'll make things more consistent. Frankly, it's a question of terminology that I can be solved with a terminology swap, this it has an easy answer. I'm more looking to "describe," if you will, the sort of creature our characters turn into when they become Incarnates. It's the sort of creature which has god-like power, but which is not literally a god itself, nor born of a god, nor otherwise divine. That's not to say we can't be if that's how we want to tell it, but more that we don't have to.

What abilities would such a creature have, then?

Isn't that the point, though? We've been these things for 50 levels. Why add more levels on top of this if we're not going to go beyond where we are? I'm reminded of the outcry against Indiana Jones finding aliens, but... How else do you top finding the Arc of the Covenant and becoming immortal, really? That's kind of where we're at - we've taken down literal gods, we've saved our world and others, we've taken on entire armies... Where do you go from here if NOT into outright godhood or whatever we want to call it? Where do we go from here if not into abandoning the limitations which shaped our path thus far and becoming something more?

Personally, I feel that the gimmicks are less necessary because of the character level of the players involved and more necessary because these events can feature 24 players. Even when they're not entirely very well built or packed with Incarnate powers, 24 player characters are amazingly powerful due to the way buffs and debuffs stack in this game.

Moreover, though, I firmly believe that an overcoming of the limitations is definitely an ability that Incarnates/Gods/Demigods should possess. And I don't just mean overcoming of the game's numerical limitations like hit points, resistance and defence, but an overcoming of narrative limitations in general. For instance, many City of Villains story arcs feature securing a ship to travel to Paragon City as its own mission, or at the very least boarding one. That's a limitation an Incarnate should not face, as an Incarnate should be able to travel from the Isles to the City... I want to say "instantly," but at least on his own.

The reason I say this is it's practically unconscionable to be to give someone the power of the gods in terms of narrative, and then still have that someone be stupid or crap in battle or unable to go anywhere. Maybe it's just a power fantasy of mine, I don't know, but being able to break 50 levels of hard limitations is kind of why I find Incarnates so exciting as a prospect even though I don't like the Well storyline or the raiding required.

To my eyes, Incarnates shouldn't be just a face in a crowd, but rather the centre of the story. They should be the important ones, the big ones, the ones everything ultimately revolves around because - like never before - they are the most powerful thing around. "In fact, the combat prowess of a boss" rule is pretty much this.

I do believe it is. Now, I admit, at first it had me confounded. After all, why would my super-fast young school girl be able to summon ghostly minions or shoot lightning from her hands? Well, the thing is... At some point you more or less have to. Biting the ankles of giant monsters only takes you up so far, but at some point, you have to start going to other dimensions on your own, you have to develop some way to fight incorporeal enemies, you have to find some ways to attack aliens in their space crafts in orbit, you have to find some way to get to other planets and so forth. When the scope of the story grows, the abilities your character needs to posses grow with it. Sure, you can craft artificial means into the story itself - you can't get into space, but there's a Han Solo - but then you're not really telling the story of a demigod any more. A demigod has to be able to do these things by himself.

Think about it terms of story structure. We didn't wake up one day with a halo over our heads... Well, Vanden did, but that's besides the point. Point is, we earned our way into power comparable to that of a demigod, but (if you ignore the actual Well storyline like you should) you did so through your own means. Maybe you collected a whole host of artefacts that can do these things, maybe your inherent mutations developed further, maybe you made better tech. Who knows? The point is that you've travelled the world, faced its greatest challenges and amassed a wealth of abilities that aren't as narrowly focused as, frankly, the one thing you could do when you were just starting out.

If you look back to a lot of established heroes' stories, they really start out being able to do just one thing. For instance, maybe you can fly. Bang, you're a super hero, and that's your only power. Or you can regenerate. Great. You're a hero, and that's your power. But as you start reaching demigod levels of power, JUST that one ability isn't going to cut it, because there's only so far you can enhance it before you drop off the edge of ridiculousness and plunge into the ocean of absurdity. So you can punch people really hard. So what happens if those people shoot at you from farther than an arm's reach and there are no buildings to climb? Well, maybe you can also jump. And maybe you can shoot, too. So what if your enemies are ghosts? Well, you know of a technique to hit incorporeal things. So what if your enemies are in another dimension? Well, you have an alien artefact that can take you to another dimension. What if your enemies surround you? Well, you know of a magic spell that can summon an army of demons to your aid.

You can see how the literal need for more abilities snowballs with the scope of the story and how quickly a one-trick hero can grow into a force to be reckoned with even if said hero's power level isn't over 9000. Once you're playing in the big leagues, you kind of have to have a bag of tricks because not only will your enemies have more and more tricks, but the variety of enemies and the cheapness of their gimmicks will only get worse and worse. When you're a young hero just starting out, the universe is fair. If you can punch things, your enemies can usually be defeated by punching them or by punching something else that in turn lets you punch them. When you become a demigod, however, the universe expects you to step up and WILL throw enemies who are immune to punches at you. Then what do you do? Well, you pull out one of the tricks you're supposed to have, hence the topic subject.

I honestly think that's something of a limited interpretation of "demigods." Essentially, what you're doing is drawing on the history of mythology and pulling out genuine divine beings from there. That's an overarching problem with the Incarnate lore in general - it more or less tries to change what our characters are in order to excuse giving us more powers, and it really doesn't have to.

Personally, I interpret the Incarnate version of a demigod less as someone who literally has the power of a patron god (that would be lame) and more as someone whose powers have grown to such a level that they rival even those of the gods, themselves. I may have slacked off on my mythology, but I don't recall there being a god of guns, yet our Incarnates could have their godlike powers almost entirely revolve around guns just the same. It's not divine power or godly power, it's god-LIKE power, which is to say power on the same level as the gods, but not necessarily coming from the same source.

I recall an interesting anecdote from an old French animated show with a somewhat similar motif. Every 10 000 years, a race is held between all races in the universe, and the champion becomes the "Avatar," the all-powerful god being of the universe who can do nearly anything. The problem is that before he won, the previous Avatar was an immensely powerful sorcerer, so even though he lost his powers when his "tennure" ran out, he still had enough strength left in him to challenge the actual avatar, who was personally a very powerless little weakling without his divine intervention assistance.

That's more or less how I see our Incarnates - as people who are so powerful that they can challenge the gods of history directly, but whose power comes from their own abilities and items, rather than from their status.

Let me put it this way - if there's no real downside to queueing up for a Trial, I'd queue up for it. The worst that can happen is I never get on one, but if I have something else to do, I'll do that and just keep on queueing till the cows come home. Sooner or later people will catch on to the "no downsides" thing and start queueing, and we'll eventually start seeing Trials formed out of the queue. It's far easier to click a button and go about your business than it is to monitor channels, lemme' tell ya!

As for PuG raids failing... Yeah, that I can see, but I personally consider it a flaw of raid design, at least for most of them. To my mind, designing raids which are only accessible through a random game joining feature and then going ahead to make them require strict coordination, leadership and prior training is just awkward planning. If they're supposed to require this kind of rigorous micromanagement and preparation, then don't put them in a LFG queue. If you put them in a LFG queue, then ensure that people who join a raid from it actually have a snwoball's chance in hell of succeeding.

If need be, raid instructions need to be included in some kind of easy-to-access guide somewhere on the US. Maybe make Prometheus able to be called from inside the raid instance so that he can provide point-for-point instructions and tactical suggestions in case people are setting foot in a raid for the very first time. Automating the team-building process also requires automating the instruction process, because you very well could have an entire league made up of first-timers, and you NEED to inform those of how to play your obtuse Trial.

Personally, I hate tasks that you're supposed to fail a dozen times before you trip over backwards into even the faintest idea of how to succeed or - much more commonly - read about how to succeed on a fansite. That's either "guide dang it" or "nintendo hard," depending on how you see it, and I consider nether to be good design.

While that's true, I've seen a shocking number of people who do not know this, and refuse to believe that there are faster ways to level up in the 20s than infinite DFBs. I've had to argue with people who insisted my level 32 Brute was better off running the DFB "because you can" than running solo missions or regular teams. When the DFB is all people know, that's all they do. There needs to be some mechanic in place to limit this at least at some point.

Well, I imagine I'll do what my friend did in WoW - queue up for a zillion different things, and if one shows up when I'm unavailable, I'll let the prompt time out or refuse it, and then wait for the next one in the list. Then again, I've never been shy of abandoning instances when I'm alone. Like you said - the instance will be there when I come back, and I'm usually solo so who gives a toss about the instance if I don't?

My general point is that if you can get people engaged into Incarnate-applicable characters and playing them at the time, you have a MUCH higher chance of getting even the stout dissenters to join Trials from time to time. A lot of people - myself included - complain about Trials, but the bulk of this is because Trials are seen as the status quo. If you allow us to turn Trials into the exception to the rule, which is "my own stuff at my own pace," then I WILL run them as a change of pace.

Few things in this game are so bad I will NEVER run them at all, but a lot of things I don't want to run very often.

Reese doesn't bother me. Yes, he's a dick, but he gets his comeuppance, so that's justified. What bothers me far more is people who are dicks, but whom I can't stab through the chest in an instanced mission.

I'm not sure that's true, at least not intrinsically. In fact, here's my current situation and - exaggeration and fabrication notwithstanding - the biggest reason I just don't do Trials: I don't play my 50s. Why would I? When the only way I have of progressing them is Trials and I have to sit on my hands and wait for a Trial to form (which I won't), what reason do I have to even log in a 50? What reason, I mean, that I didn't have prior to I19? Because I didn't play my 50s before that, and I don't play them since.

Now consider a solo Incarnate path. All of a sudden, I DO have a reason to log in and play my 50s, because I can make progress on them even if the rest of the world went to sleep that day. Moreover, if they make the LFG Queue work from within an instance, the exact reverse of what you postulate will happen. People might (and probably will) play the solo Incarnate path as a first choice, but will do so always queued and look out for a Trial. Whenever one of those shows up either in the queue or over Global, they will do that, instead, because it's a faster, easier source of progress (I assume).

The biggest mechanical reason that turns people like me off Trials is not having anything to do when one isn't being formed. Give us something to do, and we just might elect to do trials just as a change of pace, in much the same way I run TFs now. These days, I'll be playing solo missions when I get a tell or see a Global call recruiting for a TF. I think... "Hmm... I haven't run this TF in a while. Why not?" So I ditch my instance (it'll be there when I come back) and join up with the TF. The trick is to keep me interested when I'm NOT doing forced teaming, because you first have to get me to log into a character capable of running this content before you have a shadow of a hope of getting me to run it.

And, no, I will not switch characters if I heard a call. I play what I want, when I want to play it. The game does not dictate when I swap characters.

Yeah, and considering we rip apart Arachnos base after Arachnos base time and time again, I'm not worried. It's just "but thou must" where one doesn't need to exist. I'm pretty sure villains would be perfectly happy to screw over a Patron if that patron were aiming to screw us over anyway.

But again, if I got to break canon and go off the rails, punching and shooting various annoying villain contacts is the direction I'd go. Whenever people ask for "more villainous stuff," someone invariably brings up killing civilians. Screw that! I want to kill the pompous bastards who try to order me around! Ain't that villainous AND fun?

I'm pretty sure his description says something along the lines of "Trapdoor has learned to teleport to multiple locations, allowing him to fight and rest at the same time." I'd have to look at it to give you an exact quote.

*edit*
I couldn't find his Incarnate bio on ParagonWiki and I have no characters with easy access to the in-game critter, so at this point my memory is all I have to go on.

I think Evil Geko and a few others were insisting Trapdoor was doable with any powerset combo on any AT and that they had done so in Beta without abusing the corridor trick that eventually got patched away. I could be wrong, however, but that's what I recall from I19 Beta.

From my experience, the arc is tough but doable for melee folk. Probably not nearly as much for the more team-oriented ATs, though my take on "support characters" will probably just derail the thread into a quarrel.

I did notice that it's the Momentum animations of powers that most often had delayed hit effects, but I don't think the culprit is as easy to point to. The difference in attack speed between having and not having Momentum is not insignificant, and is quite a bit longer than the delay in these attacks. If hit effects actually were delayed by as much as the Momentum difference, this would have been far more obvious to far more people and would likely never have been allowed to go Live. Well, so I hope, anyway

At the very least with Rend Armour, it's pretty obvious that its non-Momentum animation is that of Assassin's Blade from Ninja Blade, but with added "wind" effects, which makes it obvious why everything is timed right - it was timed right in the animation this is drawn from. The with-Momentum animation of Rend Armour, however, looks to be brand new, and as such is mistimed. To be honest, the "wind" effect on the with-Momentum animation for Rend Armour is also early, but I didn't want to break the video down into such small segments as it would have become confusing.

All it all, it seems to me that the brand new attacks which were made for this set are the biggest culprits. Whoever made the effects for these did a great job in terms of manufacturing the visuals, but either didn't have enough time to finish timing them down to the individual frame (which is somewhat dubious since we reported this weeks before the set went Live) or was otherwise pulled off to do another project and simply hasn't had time to go back and tune up the timing. I don't want to come off as insulting the artist's work, as to me this is more unfinished than anything else, and I hope the timing is tightened up a lot.

For the record, perfect timing is not a creature of myth. Quite a few of the Titan Weapon attacks already have frame-perfect timing. I have a strong rig and was filming a dead spot, so the video is shot at 45 FPS for the most part. Even at 45 FPS, slowed down to a quarter speed and advanced frame by frame, the timing I called perfect quite literally WAS perfect, with the actual weapon animation coinciding with the power's hit effect within a frame of each other. It's doable.

Actually, Dual Blades Vengeful Slice was the first power I did a slow-mo video for exactly because it was so mis-timed and no amount of reporting it seemed to do anything. I ended up PM-ing the video to BABs directly at one point a few months before it finally got fixed. I can't say whether my video is the one that did it or if we just piled on enough complaints, but in my eyes that seemed to take forever. That power had four swings, FIVE hit effects in terms of graphics but played only three sounds and nothing was synched with anything else. Oi!

In my attempts to keep a consistent angle and location through all attack videos, I accidentally ended up filming most of Arc of Destruction's Momentum-less attack half-clipped into a wall. This is the first time I realised just HOW much real estate these animations take up to play out. It looked like I had plenty of room in front of my character and behind her, but I ended up clipping both with the dummy in front and with the wall behind. Wow!

But, no, I didn't notice the arm. I just got Arc of Destruction yesterday, which is what I'd been waiting on to do this compilation, so I haven't had a chance to play with the power proper. I'll keep an eye out for it, though.

On knowing what's going on: The Titan Weapons animations are actually pretty simple. Rather, they're straightforward - each attack follows a more or less planar arc and consist of mostly a single attack motion. It's just that each attack has two rather distinct animations, so there are a lot of animations to remember. It's easy to tell once you get used to the set, though. And the animations ARE different, have you noticed? Almost all the Momentum-less attacks come out of the right and swing to the left because the character ratchets back to the right. However, almost all the Momentum animations are the reverse - they come from the left and then swing to the right. Defensive Swipe actually changes its direction between animations and Rend Armour reels back to the "other" side.

As for the sound effects, I suspect they changed a little since Beta. They seem louder to me, at least. More metal banging, less just wind. That, and Whirling Smash has a very heavy, hard impact sound, almost like what you used to hear in the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons when two cars collided. It's distinct enough to make it sound very heavy. Arc of Destruction, sadly, does not have the same sound, which is disappointing.

I didn't include sound effects in this because I'm running the footage at a quarter speed and the sound is REALLY funky when played that slow

In my experience, the damage numbers are almost exactly synced up to the hit effects, which are almost exactly synced up with the sound effects for all powers. I think what you're seeing a problem with is the "Miss" messages. For some reason, these are HIDEOUSLY delayed, often appearing two or more seconds after the attack has missed. It throws me off a lot when I see my attack fire and nothing happens. I can never tell if I'm lagging or if the Miss message will just pop up in a minute.

Also, when your damage numbers start coming in late, keep a VERY sharp eye on your netgraph. Red bars and lost packets on that can cause damage numbers and enemy defeats to be delayed on your end. I've had that happen quite a few times because my connection occasionally spazzes out for seconds at a time and just starts dropping my packets left and right. However, in normal play, I've not experienced damage being delayed past the hit effect on the enemy.

Right, right, I forgot. Truth be told, it turns out I didn't have to. I did the Safeguard to get a contact in Kings Row, who immediately sent me to the Hollows, whereupon I slapped my forehead and went: "Doh! I meant to do the Hollows this time!" I'm not sure if I'd have levelled up to 12 in time finish Julius' missions otherwise, though.

Funny enough, this reminds me of the Spoony One's take of the last ride of the eponymous "Spoony Bard" through "Dungeonland." From what I can tell from the comments, their GM was improvising quite a bit, and EVERYTHING in Wonderland wanted them dead.

More to point, that's how I see it, as well, and that's a big reasons why I want nothing to do with iTrials. They seem designed to crush players through a cheating meat grinder and leave us no option but to min/max just to survive. And if we don't? Well, those last 50 levels of being awesome don't mean squat. In iStuff, WE are the minions.