Samuel_Tow

To quote Indigo: Easy! Just off the top of my head:

The Well of the Furies is lost. Now. It wasn't in the past, though, and it just so happens Imperious knows where it is. Turns out the Midnighters' translation magic was ambiguous, and he just didn't know we were looking for it. Of course, being what it is, the Well is guarded by hideous monsters and in a place that's difficult to get to, like at the bottom of the Underworld or something. Getting to it is no mean feat!

However, once you get to it and share in its power... That's it. That's that. You have the power of the Incarnate. Only you don't really. You have the seed of that power, but nothing good comes for free. You can't just snap your fingers and be a god, you have to work at it. So, having found the power, it's up to you to use it and train for it in order to reach higher and higher levels of incarnate potential.

Why are you after it? Erm... Because it's there? Why do you want it? You mean aside from because it makes us more powerful? Who sends us to go get it? No-one, really. Imperious just guides us, but it's our own initiative that sends us there. How do you hone those skills? I dunno. Kill big things? Train under 100G? Visit the Peninsula of Levelling? Find the old man who lives at the top of the mountain? Kill Skuls? Why not all of the above?

That's basically what I'm saying. The story can focus on the journey and let us decide our own motivations. City of Villains is a lesson in how NOT to do things, because it assumes we want to be in Arachnos from level 1, and then it just runs with that concept for the next 49 levels. You don't want to? Well tough cookies! You're gonna'! It doesn't have to be like this. In fact, there was no reason to do it like this to begin with.

You know, it'd be good if you stopped trying to guess my hidden motives for five minutes. Then I wouldn't have to keep explaining what should be obvious. So I mentioned a bunch of heroes and you assume I don't play villains. I picked heroic motivations because those are the easiest to explain. I see no reason why villainous motivations can't work exactly the same way. As long as the system doesn't try to enforce its own vision on why you want the power, you can have any motivation you want

On RP arguments: trying to dictate why something should be done for the sole reasons that it makes RP sense is an unwinnable argument, because everyone can spin RP to say absolutely anything. I can say it doesn't make sense for robots to have the power of the gods because they don't have souls, you can easily claim that only robots can have the power of the gods because those powers were not meant for mortal men and only the soulless can use them. Since this isn't real, neither one is right, hence why the argument is unwinnable.

What I've been putting forward is an argument of preference that is RP-related only tangentially. I prefer to have RP left up to me to decide, not something given to me by the game. This isn't really something you can counter with RP narrative. This is only something you can counter with your own opinion. You are free to disagree, just as long as you're aware you're not going to change my opinion by stating your own.

No, not in the slightest. For probably the third time, I don't mind the game having special content required to earn this new power. Like capes and auras, as long as it makes sense in-world, I can deal with it. I still won't like it, simply because what you describe is how I WANT to see the thing done, but being realistic, I can see and accept special content being involved in this. After all, once you go Super Sayin, you're gonna' need content geared for that level of power in order to gain the ability to go Super Sayin 2.

What I don't want this to involve is being "employed" by some "mysterious stranger." I'm sick and tired of working for other people, including on my heroes. I want to get this power ON MY OWN. Other people can come along and help me, themselves looking for a piece of the power, but as long as I'm not under their employ, I don't mind. Villain-side, the Dean McArthur and I-can't-believe-it's-not-Leonard arcs do just that, hence why I view them as precedent.

6) A smart or suspicious hero would tell him to sod off.
7) A megalomaniacal villain will be offended at the prospect.

Again, stop trying to invent more people for me to serve. It's no longer funny.

And again, stop trying to tell me what I'm thinking. You're not getting any warmer.

I said WoW for two reasons: One, for hyperbole, because saying "like WoW" just carries an intrinsically higher punch, and for another, because that's the one other MMO that I'm most familiar with, on account of having a friend who played it fervently and who did the gear grind and the raid loop. He had the good sense to realise how bored he was and just kicked the game to the curb (after having his account stolen twice), and I simply have no intention of going through the same motions as him.

On that note, just because the game is an MMO, it doesn't mean it has to be like every MMO ever made. Once you start describing an MMO like you can, say, every Oscar-winning movie ever made, then something is wrong with the game and the industry in general. I said as much when I brought up Crime Craft, but when you start defining your game as "has economy, has raids, has loot, has auction house" and neglecting to mention what it's actually ABOUT, then that's very bad indeed.

WoW is the benchmark. It shouldn't be, for the simple reason that you can't beat WoW by doing exactly what WoW does, but it is. I view this as highly dangerous, because most other MMOs seem to keep acquiring features from it as if by osmosis. Not necessarily good features, either, and not always even relevant to the game they're being introduced it. Years ago, people made this exact argument: They were here and not in WoW because they weren't interested in the raid grind and the gear arms race. I was among them. And I fear it is exactly this raid grind that we were missing which the Incarnate system aims to "fix." I hope I'm wrong. I would gladly eat crow and apologise if I'm wrong. But at this point, I'm just afraid that "raid grind" is exactly what we'll be getting, and people like me, people who prefer smaller teams and less optimal builds, will be politely told that if they don't like it, they don't have to use it.

I dare say it's mostly word choice and phrasing. I have no problem with your posts, myself, and as I've said elsewhere, I enjoy this. But it just feels like you keep assuming what I must be thinking that keeps sending the discussion sideways, specifically since I can't seem to let it go.

Basically, what I'm saying is that I have no problem with a storyline explaining HOW we are getting the powers, but I do mind a storyline explanation of WHY I'm getting them. And, yes, being employed by someone is a "why."

Well, that solves the one problem I had with single player Merits. Originally when they awarded for story arcs, I thought that each character was hard-capped on the Merits he could ever get outside of repeatable team content, as arcs are not repeatable. If Ouro arcs grant Merits, then that gives solo players repeatable Merit-granting content.

See? That's the kind of out I'm talking about as a last resort.

You know, it's odd how people keep going out of their way to insist they don't care about what other people think about them.

Rest is completely broken..Start looking for ways to fix it.,

I honestly can't agree with you here. Trying to make both in and out of Granite Armour viable is what led us to the current state of Granite Armour - a toggle which is highly useful and highly annoying. I'd much sooner balance it via uptime than via drawbacks that sit somewhere between annoying me and making me skip the power altogether. To be honest, I generally HATE powers balanced by providing drawbacks. It's a design principle that never sits well with me, not in a "friendly" game like this one.

If I'm going to balance something, I'll balance it based on how much benefit it provides and how much it doesn't provide, but outside of absolute necessity, I'd never design something via instituting a PENALTY, especially such a penalty that can't just be waited out. Common T9 powers' penalty isn't the debuffs, it's that you shouldn't be fighting when they drop. Fair enough, eight finish up before they drop or RUN. Let them drop, Rest, wait for the debuff to time out and rejoin the fight. The powers are really not designed to force you to fight with the penalty. In fact, the penalty is designed to force you to not fight.

Any power that imparts a penalty that you HAVE to fight with (or lose out on the power's benefit) instantly becomes a power I'm going to look REALLY unfavourably at. If anything happens to Granite Armour, I hope to see its design move away from "fighting with debuffs" and move more into just fighting, but being limited in where or how often you can do it.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here, Johnny. Not on principle, but as a compromise. It's been my experience that if there isn't content which CANNOT be done solo, certain people will simply never be happy. And I can deal with that. TFs tend to tell their won, self-contained stories that, if you don't want to team, you can just ignore and it won't harm your experience of the game's story much. In short, I don't mind having content that requires teaming. What I mind is having EXCLUSIVE rewards hidden behind this content.

To point: I wouldn't mind content which required Incarnate levels of power, or indeed large teams of Incarnates. That's fine. That's what the added power is for. What I WOULD mind is having Incarnate levels themselves being locked behind forced teaming content. By all means, have team content for it, and give it faster levelling, to boot. It comes with the territory. But give me a solo alternative. Preferably one written specifically for people who don't like big groups and large events, but even just an afterthought would be fine.

But please don't turn Incarnate levels into the equivalent of trying to kit out a build in Hamidon enhancements.

Just about any mission in City of Heroes is applicable to just about any character concept that tries it. The missions give you objectives to accomplish, but do not try to tell you WHY you are accomplishing them. So zombies are kidnapping people to cut them up for parts. So? Who gives a crap? Well, my character does, because he can't see innocents hurt while evil men triumph. My other character does, too, because she sees herself as a genuine super hero and feels it is her duty to save people in trouble. My other character does, too, because he's in the business of developing crime prevention technology and applying it himself is good publicity. So does my other character, because the city pays her bills in return. And so does my other character, for no reason whatsoever.

The game tells me WHAT to do. It's up to me to decide WHY I want to do it. You can talk me in circles all day, but this is not going to change. The moment the game tells me "you want to get stronger because..." I'm going to balk. On the spot. Things like "The voices tell you to smash!" or "You hate the smell of Carnival of Shadows!" are BAD WRITING.

You are asking for a reason as to why we want the power of the Incarnates. I'm telling you that I don't need the game to give me this reason, because I can make up my own. I don't mind the feature itself written into a particular storyline, I don't even mind having a specific story related to HOW I'm getting the power. I won't necessarily like it, but I can deal with it, provided the power doesn't come with a non-removable label saying "Power of the Incarnate: This is not yours!" It's the old Epics vs. Patrons debate. Epics are my powers MINE MINE MINE, whereas Patrons are other people's powers that I just borrow. AGGRAVATING! And it wouldn't be half as bad if the game didn't assume I wanted their powers because I wanted to give my heart to frikkin' Arachnos!

Anyway, I do NOT want a storyline that says "This requires the power of the Incarante. You want this, so you will go get that." This is bad writing in the extreme, and we do not need it. It's much better to say "Hey, new stuff has shown up and you can use it to get more powerful. Wanna?" Why? Who cares! Maybe I just want to be more powerful, maybe I want to save the world, maybe I want to fulfil an ancient prophecy or maybe I'm just bored. MY CHOICE!

Uh-huh. Never heard that one before, by golly.

I don't.

When was the last time City of Heroes followed the route set by every MMO ever made? I dunno, let me think. Hamidon, Rikti Ship Raid, the concept of multi-team Giant Monsters, Inventions, the Market, the STF and RSF, ultra-rare purples and even more rare PvP recipes, the Cathedral of Pain and PvP base raids (defunct but still here). People have been asking for stuff taken fed-ex out of the standard MMO handbook for years, and the developers eventually yielded and started giving us cleverly-modified versions of just that.

Also consider the "solo vs. teaming" aspect. We CAN solo, but they have never, EVER stepped out and guaranteed us that we can. We kind of just can if we manage it, and if we don't, too bad so sad. They've been treating solo play like an unintended slight that's just not worth addressing since day one, and Jack went far out of his way to stamp out the very concept of solo play. Most of the new content we get is in the form of TFs and trials, and even the solo-possible content we get still ends on gimmick bosses that end up requiring a team to beat anyway.

Look at it that way - the developers keep insisting that elite bosses are not designed to be soloable. They CAN be and that's just fine, but if they're not, no-one will shed a tear over it. Yet every frikkin' story arc ends in an elite boss. Take a moment to let that sink in. Almost every story arc (especially CoV-side) ends in a fight that is not specifically designed to be soloable. Most of them ARE, but they aren't specifically designed to be.

And to top it all off, all the "epic" content is not just team-centric, but team-centric and CHEATING. What hope do I have of having a solo option to earn Incarnate points and maybe even Incarnate levels? Because I'm not gonna' team for it, not enough to get too far in, and the result is that I'll pay for a system that's specifically designed to NOT let me use it. Kind of a bum deal, that.

*edit*
I'm not trying to be a dick here. I honestly do not want an Incarnate story which writes into my characters' bio for me, and the process of gaining Incarnate levels is a real, pressing concern of mine that "I'll be OK." isn't going to put to rest.

To quote Adam Savage: Well, there's your problem! You won't find many here who bought the game through Steam, so your best bet is to just work with Customer Support. The CS guys here, especially Tech Support, are really cool and will go out of their way to have your problems sorted. In general, though, if you have non-crippling technical problems, you can always try with player help first by posting in the Technical Issues & Bugs forum.

As far as what to play, take people's advice. Scrappers hero-side and Brutes villain-side are the easiest to play and learn. I'd steer clear of Blasters for a while, though, at least until you get a good grip of some of the finer points of gameplay, because they're liable to get you killed if you so much as slip up and take a certain degree of situational awareness to play right that is just unfair to ask from a new player.

Don't be afraid to experiment and make new characters. Don't be afraid to take power that look cool. It's very hard to make a broken character here. Just make sure you focus on your primary and secondary powerset (as in, don't neglect them) and you should be fine.

It's probably wise to let you get your game running before swamping you with more advice you won't be able to apply at the moment, so let us know when you can log in and we'll swamp you some more

My problem here is that they've been trumpeting how hard the new content is going to be like that's a good thing. To quote Yahtzee (yet again): "Bread goes hard if you leave it on the sidewalk long enough, but that's hardly an improvement." I'm just afraid WoW-style raids IS what they're aiming for, why I don't know, and like you said, if it's rejected by a meaningful portion of the playerbase, it won't be altered until people like me no longer care. I dare say the reaction to the system with Going Rogue is not going to matter, because any changed made to it will count down from I19 onward.

And while I admit this is not giving the development enough credit in the face of all the cool things they've done because we asked them to, this particular instance IS NOT one where developer ideas match my own very often.

To be fair, all of the actual end-game content we have is forced teaming, that much I will agree, but the rewards generated from most of it are not actually exclusive to that content. Granted, Hamidon enhancements are, but more regular Inventions can match them blow for blow in a lot of cases, and those are available to solo players, as well, either through random drops or through Merits earnable via story arcs. Do Ouro story arcs grant Merits, by the way? And purple recipes ostensibly only drop off solo-compatible activity, which is to say killing things at level 47+. Even the Mothership Raid, as large-scale as that is, still provides a resource that's obtainable otherwise via defeating Rikti and completing War Zone missions.

I'm well aware that our developers are always looking for new and creative ways to subtly force teaming down our throats, but so far they've been pretty cool about giving us a back door to the rewards generated by "epic" content, if not to the content itself.

That said, I'm not in the slightest safe in the knowledge that this is what Incarnate levels are going to be. I am deathly afraid that the new Incarnate content is going to be WoW-style raids all the way, solely and only, and that my complaints will essentially be rebuffed. I'm most afraid because I don't really want to have to look for another game to play.

Aren't you basically talking about travel power suppression? As I understand it, "movement buff" effects in travel powers suppress when you attack, so it's not inconceivable to think that the power could apply a large speed debuff all the time, but also provide a suppressable speed buff that activates when you attack or are attacked, essentially cancelling out the effect. Provided both the buff and debuff are immune to outside modifiers (like enhancements and resistances), then it should be mechanically possible to work. Not sure how it would interact with other movement speed buffs, but I don't assum there'd be anything too out of the ordinary.

That said... I'm not a fan of this solution, for the simple fact that it does nothing to mitigate Granite Armour's perpetual availability, not anything to solve the problem of Granite Tanks getting T9 protection permanently. The absolute movement debuff discussed before does this by forcing people to detoggle if they want to travel and my eminator idea forces it by anchoring the buff to a specific location. Umbral's approach forces this via direct intervention - they system toggles your armour off and forces you to wait for it to recharge. All of those revolve around giving Granite Armour full functionality but limiting in on uptime. Movement speed suppression doesn't do that. It hurts the armour in combat, exactly when it needs its speed the most, yet benefits the armour in out-of combat mobility, exactly where it should suck.

To be honest, it's a mechanically beautiful fix, but conceptually and practically, it sounds like the complete opposite of what we should be shooting for.

What I'm saying is that if the armour is tough enough, it may well just survive long enough for its "summon" to recharge, thereby making it permanent. You'd need a good analysis of outgoing damage between your average AV and, say, your average 5-man spawn or some such, but I highly suspect they're on different levels entirely. That's the problem. Strong enough for an AV is too strong for everything else. Strong enough for everything else is too weak for an AV. Or so it seems, upon cursory examination.

Yeah, when you have someone who can't help but be antagonistic with practically every sentence... Well, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

Ah, there we go. Another bigot has entered the stage. You can pick your badge up over there.

Do you realise you're quoting something that is almost universally derided as an argument for your case? "Come play City of Villains. It sucks!" is hardly an argument that will convince me to support more of this. If anything, City of Villains should be a lesson in how NOT to do thing. Honestly, from everything I've heard of the CoV railroading storyline, responses tend to vary between "I hate it!" and "Eh, it's not too bad." but I have never, ever heard anyone come out and say "By golly! The way City of Villains is structured is GRRRATE!" Ever. You REALLY do not want to bring CoV up as backing for your argument.

Furthermore, come play City of Heroes and tell me what the "goal" of getting more powerful is, aside from the reaching a state of being more powerful. There isn't one overriding, overall storyline for the whole game from 1 to 50, and to be honest, all the better for it. As you said, tailoring the game to be unique for every individual player is impossible, so you simply don't tailor the game to the players. You present them with a persistent world within which they follow a variety of unconnected, though cross-referencing storylines and let people make up their own motivation for why they keep on fighting.

To try and tell people "THIS is what you're fighting!" is just incredibly bad form, and I'd have thought City of Villains burned us all hard enough to teach us to know better. Seriously. We don't need the game to tell us why we want to get stronger. That's what the Description field is for.

We don't even know HOW this power would be gained, but let's go along with your idea. Why didn't I hunt down the Well of the Furies earlier? Because I didn't know where it was. "Didn't," as in past simple. I didn't know where it was, I do now. How did I find out? Who cares? Maybe I searched the globe until I stumbled upon it, maybe I'm psychic and I just "knew" where it was, maybe I'm a space alien who can sense godlike powers. Or maybe, just maybe, it was common knowledge before I even came to this world, as it's going to happen with any character created after Going Rogue launches.

I not only do I not need to be given an explanation as to why I'd want the power of the Incarnates, I don't WANT an explanation as to why I'd be going after it. It would be incredibly and unbelievably railroading if the game tried to pull the old "you think/you feel" trick, especially since the developers appear to have learned their lesson from CoV, if the new content is any indication.

And, to be completely honest, I am SICK AND TIRED of heroes and villains joining together to fight a common thread. Sick and tired of it like you wouldn't believe. We join together to fight the Rikti, then we join together to fight Imperious, then we join together to fight the Coming Storm, then we join together to go shopping for holiday gifts, and before long, people are asking what the point of contacts warning us not to fight among ourselves is if we've been doing everything since 2009 together like best buddies. There's no point in having heroes and villain to begin with if all you'll have them do is join forces to fight something else all the time. It's a cheap, unappealing comic book kludge that shouldn't be used very often and definitely shouldn't be used for all the biggest threats. Not only is it silly, I'm getting tired of my world-destroying villains getting roped into saving the world over and over again.

And please, stop trying to tell me what I know, what I can do and what I want. These are RP arguments, and by their very definition, RP arguments are unwinnable. The best thing they can do is let us pick our own reasons and motivations.

That's what I have the most problem with when it comes to perma Granite Armour - the kind of penalties people are talking about that would be "worth it" are either laughably benign or so irritating that I'm simply not going to bother with it. Traditional T9 powers strike a good balance, because they give you powers which, when they're on, they don't give you any staggering problems. It's just that they can't be on all the time. If I had to choose, I'd rather have a good power all the time than a half-***** power all the time.

On the subject of "not gonna' bother," just look at powers like Repulsion Field, or as I'd like to call it, "FF's schmuck bait sucker trap." A power that has such a back-breakingly huge endurance cost that it can drain YOUR ENTIRE BAR IN SECONDS. A a cost of 0.78 per second and 1.0 per enemy affected (ticking twice a second, mind you), you really can expend all of your endurance really, really fast, and for what? PBAoE knockback. I've heard of a few people who try to leverage that mess of a power, but even they will go on the record as describing it as "a click that walks like a toggle." If that's what it takes to make a player want to turn off a toggle he's not supposed to run full-time, then I'm not going to bother taking the toggle to begin with. Furthermore, I'll do my best to complain about it and get it changed, because after a certain point, power drawbacks simply invalidate the power, no matter how good its benefits may be.

I don't think the numbers you're looking at are correct. I checked out Red Tomax's City of Data, and it does indeed list what you mentioned, but I believe it's either missing effects or representing them in a non-obvious manner. One big thing is that Red Tomax seems to list Granite Armour as providing only Smashing defence. It doesn't. It provides defence against everything other than Psi damage. I checked my Stone Brute, and his Combat Attributes list defence to all aspects.

As far as I can tell from the Real Numbers feature, A Stone Tanker running everything other than Granite Armour (and Mud Pots, presumably) has:

16% defence from smashing, lethal, energy and Negative Energy damage
25% defence from psychic damage
10% resistance to smashing and lethal damage
25% resistance to fire and cold damage
20% intermittent resistance to toxic damage.

Granite Armour gives all of this up, but the only thing it cannot replicate is the Psi defence. It does, however, replace the defence and resistance with its own 20% defence from everything and 50% resistance to everything (but psi in both cases). In fact, it even provides 50% resistance to toxic damage, which can stack on top of Earth's Embrace's 20%. You are giving up practically nothing other than psi defence for protection which is somewhere up to twice as powerful, possibly more. I haven't done the math.

You're also ignoring the fact that people without Granite Armour are already running Rooted, a power which they don't necessarily use while under Granite Armour, so Granite Armour actually gives a Stone Tanker BETTER running speed than that tanker would get outside of it.

Furthermore, even ignoring Mud Pots, I can't see where you're getting your endurance consumption numbers. You list .39, which I'm reading as 0.39, which is slightly more than just one of the five (four shields + Rooted) toggles a non-Granite Tank would often need to run. Rock Armour, Brimstone Armour, Crystal Armour and Minerals are all 0.26, with Rooted costing 0.21, so together they're more like 1.25, out of 1.67 total recovery. By comparison, Granite Armour is listed as 0.26 on my end, which constitutes a little over a fifth of the endurance consumption you'd have using all the other shields.

Basically, though, I agree with your general assessment - Granite Armour is rather a LOT more powerful than all the rest of the set, specifically since it can stack with Earth's Embrace, Rooted and Stone Skin, not to mention Mud Pots. which wouldn't put you above your natural recovery levels with Granite on.

Hmm... So the "Ablative Armour" idea from the "Just Armour" suggestion? Good call, I wouldn't have thought of that. Basically, instead of being uptime-limited or location-limited, you're suggesting something that is absorption-limited. In other words, Granite Armour would provide a lot of protection, but if you ask it to stop too much, it will break faster and leave you destitute until it's probably 1000 second timer recharges. I like this idea, as it allows Granite Armour to still be practically unkillable against low-levels of damage, while having the capacity to time out fast if you fight anything sufficiently strong.

I have a bit of a problem with the implications of this, however, namely the possibility to keep the armour on all the time and the difficulty of finding a good balance point. Any power that's limited by having a certain amount of hit points before it breaks is going to have to be balanced with an AV in mind, especially Granite Armour, considering that's the biggest thing it's useful for. An AV has the tendency to hit for thousands a swing and do so repeatedly over the course of a long fight. As such, Granite Armour would literally need to have many thousands of hit points to prevent it being broken too easily when, say, Valkyrie decides to hit you with a critical Head Splitter, a power which has been able to one-shot me out of Granite Armour on my Brute.

Now, since that's what it's supposed to do and it's intended to be kept on the entire fight, that's what you balance it for. The problem is that this then makes it almost unbreakable by smaller, weaker enemies, like a bunch of white-con minions. I mean, even with my Stone Brute, I can throw on Granite Armour and Rooted and go to sleep amid a sea of dozens of minions, whereas AVs still manage to down me. Which brings us to the other problem - balancing the armour to be so hard to break as to stand up to an AV would mean it never breaks under any other set of circumstances, which then means Stone Tankers once around get to run around with God Mode levels of protection indefinitely, never to be threatened by anything at all.

The problem is I'm not sure there's a good balance point between making the armour strong enough to fight AVs but impregnable to anything else and weak enough to be broken by regular enemies but being tissue paper to most any AV. That's one of the primary reasons I'm trying to move away from trying to find a more moderate level of protection for the armour - you either make it too weak for what everyone wants to do with it, or you make it so strong it trivialises the rest of the game. At that point, you start to have to mess with its uptime outside of its levels of protection, and indeed, I don't see any good way other than turning it into a more regular click (or click-like toggle) or doing something radical like anchoring the player to a location.

Of course, I'm speaking off memory, as I haven't done the actual survivability numbers. As such, I may well be outright wrong. I like the idea of Ablative Armour, believe me. I just don't think it's a good idea for a T9 power as its sole limitation.

I don't think there needs to be a conceptual reason for giving us the ability to become more powerful. If anything, "Incarnates" are a convenient excuse to add the kind of system people have been yelling for since the beginning of time. Yes, it'd be nice to have everything wrapped up in a nice, convenient explanation, but given what they've done with The Origin of Powers story arc, I dare say this is sometimes more trouble than it's worth.

I'd say the story could easily be as simple as, to quote Yahtzee, "Magic ball give super powers, everyone want magic ball, go get magic ball, psychic trash robots" and people would still be lining up to the Incarnate distribution pavilion like the folks from Cannon Fodder 2. Having a storyline explanation as to what this power is is not necessary, as leaving it as some amorphous "hidden power" nonsense would give people more creative freedom than, say, Patron Powerpools. I'm not saying it's bad to have it, just that we don't necessarily need it. Having a storyline explanation of how you get the thing, as apparently it won't "just come naturally" does make sense, as it would explain the specific tasks involved in acquiring the power of the Incarnates. I still want to see it obtainable just by running more missions after 50, but I can understand if special circumstances are necessary.

Having an explanation of why you would want it, however, is not only unnecessary, it's actually a really bad idea. People's motivations are their own, and whether they want the power so they can fight the Hamidon, Lufgebu, the Coming Storm or the Common Cold is up to them. And if they want to use the power of the gods to make divine pies and delicious cookies, then more power to them.

Again, I'd like to see the powers of the Incarnates not so much earned by participating in a special, grindy event as UNLOCKED by said participation similar to how you gain the ability to earn Vanguard Merits by joining the organisation. As such, I'd like to see the Incarnates' explanation go as far as giving us means of unlocking the powers, but then allowing us to develop them in our own ways, should we choose to disregard its supposedly forced teaming content.