Sir_Zane

Actually, I hate the addition of the taunt aura to EA brutes. It completely destroys the stealth brute play-style.

But, I'm not getting a metric of 12 runs for the above. On my brute, which I started this week, I have done 20 BAFs alone and am still sitting at 67% to finish Lore. I have been getting around 6- 8 % bar completion per BAF run. And Lambda has been even worse. Same number of runs and still at 38% done on Destiny.

I use Unstoppable whenever I might need to and I mitigate the crash with T3 Barrier. It has been working fine this way. Or with ArchMage. Or both

Well, that supposes you succeed in doing the Trial to even get a roll for an Emp. merit.

10 threads. I know because I got this at the end of my only successful Lambda. Pretty much a letdown. LOL.

Well, given the number of trials I have run, expecting 10 threads per trial is just silly given how high the current failure rate is for LFG PUGs. I get an average of 4 - 5 threads per attempt. If you do not succeed in the trial you rarely get a incarnate salvage drop.

Having the salvage rewards be random is a mistake. Hiding advancement behind randomness will also &*(& someone.

Well, those numbers assume a fair amount of victories. The most random drops I've gotten in a trial was 6. If you are on trials which never succeed then you are missing out on astrals and emp merits which convert to a lot of shards. And the progression is a lot slower.

The PUG unfriendly nature of the Trials can be a problem. Some have said that as people try them more and learn them that they will get better. But, there is the first impression problem as well. If the first 10 attempts at a LFG PUG group are all disasters, the negative impressions can push players from continuing with the content.

One of the reasons I went for Barrier is to use it as mitigation for the Unstoppable crash. It has worked wonderfully in the two trials I have tried it in and I'm thinking about retooling back into an Unstoppable oriented Invul, which I haven't been since I3 or so.

Except that Incarnate Advancement post the Alpha slot bears no resemblance to earlier accolades. One thing that these Trials are going to introduce to the player base, in I fear a quick slap to the head way, is the concept that you can, and probably will, fail. It is one thing to count how much XP or salvage you would get for successful runs and figure out your advancement, but, they are probably not going to be all successful runs. The "wiggle-room" of success that made this game inclusive is narrowed for these Trials.

I don't think anyone has seen how slow the progress on these would go if every run you went on were unsuccessful. You might think that signing up in a queue and making getting a team "easier" would be a good thing. It also means that the level of failure will be potentially higher as well on these missions. As far as we know, the turnstile system is first in first out. There is no team creation logic, so, you could get 12 scrappers or 12 tankers for your team.

What is standard XP for finishing the ITF? The ITF I just did leveled me from 47-50 netted me well in excess of several million bonus XP. The I 19 announcement specifically stated a "Gift of XP" and double merits, not double XP finishing bonus.

I had assumed that this Gift of XP was put there to rocket more toons to 50 faster. And I was saying, in my previous post, that I thought this wasn't a great idea.
I can get to from 41 to 50 in only 3 1 hour TFs - is that WAI?

With Incarnate activity available, characters that reach 50 are even less likely to go back and try the 40-50 content they may have rocketed by, because of this "XP Gift".

I would expect the devs to put in the work to find a system which affects the least number of players and does so fairly. Fair being defined as applied equally between all players. NA players with conflicts due to the merge should have a chance at having to endure the global change. It could be based on the earliest account date or even upon a winning a coin toss gets to keep their name and the other gets the _EU or _NA appended as appropriate. The point being that each person potentially affected should share some of the risk and not have is shouldered squarely by one section of the player base.

Actually, that doesn't mean much at all. 49-50 is now a half-hour and I'm pretty sure it took way longer than that to make my Rare Alpha. I have not noticed anyone talking about it, so I will mention that this new weekly task force has completely broken the upper tier leveling system.

I had a lvl 41 character at the start of the weekly task force. After running 3 TFs (each about an hour), I am now lvl 50. 41-50 with just 3 hours play. Just like some of the XPloits in the AE or the Winterlord fiasco, I do not think that super-charging the path through the 40s is the right move.

I have no problem with a reasonable XP bonus, but what we are getting is not reasonable. Couple this with the fact that said lower-level toon is probably running the TF with one or more super-charged Alpha characters and you basically have company sanctioned power-leveling.

I chose my suggestion because it did not need a dedicated pci power lead. It works off the power from the PCIe bus which you have.

Then I am looking forward to seeing the specifics of the Incarnate Respec system.

I understand that the end game is "progressional". I am not so sure that such a system is in fact a better fit for this game than "more end-game activities". The why of this is left to a different post.

My read is that there is Incarnate XP which functions to open up the Incarnate slot (this is the progression you mentioned) AND THEN you have to craft something to put into that slot to make it "do something". Because the devs chose to present the "fill the slot with a power process" as a crafting process; they are running into conflicts with how players have used crafting process before in this game (which includes the ability to move things between alts or sell salvage at the Auction House).

The devs could have just as easily chosen to represent each potential Incarnate slot power as an XP bar and when you finish the appropriate content you choose where you want that Incarnate XP to empower. In essence, experience to power a skill-tree.

But, I understand why they wanted to break that direct flow of XP to XP bucket, the middleware you mentioned. They want to be able to fine-tune and "tweak on the fly" the progression time of the players. In fact, unlike xp acquisition, they can utilize it to tweak the progression time on a slot by slot basis, and do all other sorts of fun little tricks.

Exactly. Something will have to be done. The devs cannot create enough new hard content to keep the Incarnates interested. And if left unchecked, the old content will be unfun.

So, either the devs have to curb Incarnate abilities in non-incarnate content or have an Incarnate Scalar applied to all old content. Option 1 lets everyone play like they always have, it just runs the risk of marginalizing the point of getting Incarnate powers. Option 2 runs its own risks in segregating the player base.

Hmm. Yes, as I understand it, unlocking the new slots will be completely different than unlocking the alpha slot. It uses new XP and new salvage. XP per slot type is gated to one or the other Trial, so if you want to advance slot X which is tied to the BAF, you will have to run the BAF and only the BAF over and over for each of your characters to get the necessary XP to unlock and then to get the necessary salvage to build.

They are making the bet that these Trials will be "fun" enough to withstand such overexposure in a such short time. I'm not so sure about that. Since this is really the first exposure to what the devs are thinking of for Incarnate content, it is pretty important that it makes a good first impression.

The change that people are expressing as a "fundamental shift" is that the devs have finally applied the "bind on acquire" concept that they have been playing around with since Vanguard Merits to main character advancement. All previous "end game" items were "bind on equip".

This difference presents a (imho) large difference in how I now make decisions in the game in consuming its content. With IOs and Hami-Os, I can play any alt I want and send currency/items to another alt that may need it or can use it if that alt cannot. Also, I can choose to play any game content and I would still be making some progress on my alt and potentially any of my other alts in their end games.

The Incarnate Process is completely opposite. Each character only gets to consume what they themselves have played. There can be no sharing between alts. This is why people are calling it "alt unfriendly".

I imagine that simply allowing players to email incarnate salvage to each other would go a long way to loosening things up.

This. Way back, the power cause Knock-Up not Knock Back AND it prevented you from being rooted by powers. Move and Snipe at the same time, wickedly cool. Almost every PVP build had it. When they changed or corrected the rooting aspect and the knock up to knock back, no one used it anymore.

There are many powers in COH which need a revisit. Some of them were never useful. Some were but then were nerfed out of usefulness.