UberGuy

I would sell them until I get my 7000 sales badge, and then delete them from then on. I don't craft commons for any other reason than badges. Even on my non-badge-focused characters, I craft the 25/30 and 45/50 slots for increased storage (especially the 45/50 one since that affects recpies).

Interestingly, this is another way the set reminds me of Willpower. Very similarly themed discussions were had when it went live.

Ehh. Were those bid-based sales, or fixed price? Because if they were bid-based, then the price was that payed by the person who wanted it most, at a time when it was a limited supply item. That kind of price shouldn't guide what they charge for something if they want lots of people to buy it, and not just the folks willing to pay the most to have it.

I'm pretty sure you're right. It's interesting, though, because I'm not sure why people think that's such a great plan. If you're one of a few newbies running the trial supported by a flock of highly "incarnated" leaguemates, that'll probably work. If there's a flood of newbies running it together, it's not so hot.

Where the BAF and Lambda have spawns laced heavily with Boss rank critters, the Underground has spawns heavily laced with Elite Bosses. The AVs in the UGT are L54+1, meaning a league with few level shifts could be full of people facing a +5 AV. This doesn't look like a trial that's meant for folks with freshly minted level 50s - it looks to me like it's meant for people who are either driving pretty bad-**** characters or packing a league with a strong AT/powerset composition. (In my experience, the former is more common than the latter.)

But even just looking at the time differential between the UGT and Lambda/BAF, does the UGT's significant iXP really make it superior? Everyone needs components, especially if they're going to try and get at least rare Incarnate powers. If you need both iXP and components, why not run trials that give a better proportion? What's the value in unlocking slots before you have the stuff you need to slot in them? I'm open to the notion that there's something I'm missing here, but I just don't see it yet.

Hm. Most of the final fights I have been on have been so fast I never even saw what most of his powers did. I've never been confused by him, for example.

I like the UGT final fight better than Keyes just for the fact that what I've experienced is even an option. Keyes' final fight's structure is much more enforced.

Actual set bonuses persist no matter what the power itself is doing. The only thing that will turn them off is exemplaring to a point where the IOs stop working, which happens at anything lower than the IO's own level -3.

Note that some special IOs give you bonuses with just a single IO slotted. Some act like set bonuses and are on unless you exemplar to low. Others do depend on the power they are slotted in. You can find out which is what on this page of ParagonWiki.

Bear in mind that, for practical purposes, until I19, IO builds were about all the "endgame" CoH had. Which is not to say that they're actually end game content, but if you had a much-loved 50, and you wanted some goal to chase with playing them, Inventions were the longest-term thing out there other than some rather extreme badges.

But no, Inventions aren't required for the Incarnate end-game, specifically. If anything is "required" (and nothing really is so far), it's likely to be prior Incarnate content itself that's required (or at least advisable) for later Incarnate content.

OK, though I did miss that in your post. But still, answering the question of "what do you incarnate?" still suggests that it's a third party - the aspirin or xerox in your analogy. I think many (certainly many of mine), don't have that third party at all.

You don't have to recommend it, since you didn't disagree with me.

Emphasis mine. There are people (like me) who are going to max out the progress, or come close. We end up running it lots and lots, and while I suspect most (read: almost all) players run fewer trials than I do, I'm pretty sure others still run them quite a lot, even if they're just getting multiple characters to two Rare tiers. (Don't forget, Astral and Empyrean Merits buy other things these days, so there's more reasons to run the iTrials things.) Overall, I think this tends to converge on people doing the trials by rote, mostly concerned with getting their merits or end-reward window. And that's what the OP was hoping not to see. I'm trying to set his expectations on that particular point, because I think he may be set up for disappointment.

Perhaps other servers will have different community convergence than Justice did.

Edit: So to be clear, while the OP may not need to run iTrials dozens of times, many other people plan to, and so the general feel may be that well-choreographed dance he didn't like in "that other MMO".

I understand, but there is a distinction in whether those powers originate with the Well (and how that then manifests for the character), and whether a character's manifestation of those Incarnate powers has a thematic link to another being, like Zeus. Statesman has some sort of thematic link to Zeus (real, imagined or projected). Most of my heroes have no such thematic link to any other entity. This is a distinct and separate notion from whether or not their Incarnate status is fueled by the Well of Furies.

I don't want to be a wet blanket here, but the Incarnate system is something designed such that, at least given the current number of available trials, we run the same trials dozens of times each just to max out progress on one character. As such, it's basically unavoidable that it will devolve just as you have described. Even if you like the story, you can only be interested in reading it so many times.

The upside is that, much like the other things talked about in this thread, you don't have to go for maxed out progress. The difference in a Rare and a Very Rare incarnate ability isn't that significant most times, so it's reasonable to never bother with Very Rares, from a performance perspective. Getting to Rare tier is fairly worthwhile, though, because Rare powers from Alpha, Lore and Destiny each make you +1 effective combat level for purposes of how foes con to you. (Alpha does this full-time, Destiny and Lore only do it in iTrials.) While still not mandatory, this can be a really big performance difference - having all three is the difference in fighting +4 (or higher) foes and fighting +1 foes.

For what it's worth, this is actually less common for folks who use IOs. IOs aren't something you change very often. When one does change their IOs, it tends to take longer, because it is often a complete rework of what's slotted where, but most sensible folks don't ask a team to wait on that.

There really shouldn't be much in the way of post-SO distractions that people run off to deal with between missions. I can see people running off to sell at the auction houses, but honestly, they shouldn't need to make people wait long for that.

One of the best features of the auction house system is that it is asynchronous. You can place bids and then go do stuff or log out, and the purchases can resolve later. If it takes time to set them up, that's usually research on what to buy or how much to pay for it. That's not something anyone should be doing between missions while others are waiting.

I'm one of the people who does this. (The filling up part, not the bragging part.) I do it because I inherently enjoy it. I'm a min/maxer at heart, and the very act of achieving some new plateau of power and then testing it and seeing positive results gives me joy.

I won't claim it doesn't give any satisfaction to be able to run off by myself on an iTrial and solo stuff that wiped out a chunk of the league. It does. But by and large, I only do that sort of thing if I have to (because, for example, everyone else died), or because I honestly think it will help the league somehow.

A lot of the people who post builds are people like me. They post them because they get some joy out of creating them, and then helping others create similar things.

Unfortunately, you will meet people, here and in game, who will proclaim that some sort of DPS and/or survival min/maxed builds are the only way to go. That's just not the case. Honestly. this game is too easy for that to be the case.

Agreed. However, I do have characters though who gained their powers through ties to other beings. For example, one of my characters who's existed since Issue 1 has a backstory saying her powers are due to her being a proxy of Horus. As such, it makes sense that her Incarnate progression is due to increasing ties to that entity. Many of my characters, though, have inherent abilities, or abilities due to equipment they own, and those characters are finding greater access to their inherent abilities, or more intense ties to their gear.

Yeah, the "hot swap" term was what this sounded like to me too. If DAoC was using the term "hotfix" like that, as far as I know that was basically unique to them. Hotfix has meant to me what you described since the 90s.

Edit:

Neat. So both are correct, essentially. Just one has fallen out of "mainstream" usage.

This topic received a good talking about a while back in the Scrapper forums. At the time, there was pretty universal agreement that Revive was rubbish, but there was not universal agreement about what debuff resistance Regen would most benefit from.

Where one one's experience in this realm lies likely depends a lot on build and the mission difficulty settings with which one plays. On the settings at which I play, access to Reconstruction, Dull Pain and MoG dominate my likelihood of surviving combat with a typical spawn. If those powers are unavailable, I usually have to fall back until they become available.

Because of this, I am in the camp that says -recharge is more deadly to my character than -regen is, in general. If my regen rate is completely zeroed, that's a dangerous situation, but not a deadly one. I can usually stand and fight if my regen is zeroed, but it's typical that I have to retreat if badly recharge debuffed. I don't hate the regen resistance we got, but I would have rather gotten the recharge resistance.

I loved it for this too, but it seemed a bit exploity if you used it the other way around. Not that I minded - indeed, I gleefully leveraged it. Having an multiple 10-stacks of damage inspirations handy for a Master of Lambda trial before they adjusted Marauder's damage resistance was pretty useful.

I work in IT. My team both receives lots of "hotfix" patches from vendors and occasionally creates them for our own software.

A "hotfix" is just a targeted patch, often for one software component, that's released outside of a normal patch schedule, usually due to urgent need. Regular patch schedules typically include patches to multiple bugs across multiple components, where a hotfix is usually just to fix one thing.

Whether or not a "hotfix" can be applied to running software depends immensely on the nature of the software and on what's being patched. Having to stop the software for the patch to be picked up is typical.

I don't think I've ever had problems with CoH on desktop nVidia cards. By which I mean a new driver has never caused my CoH client specifically to malfunction, and getting a new (or old) driver has never been a fix for a problem with the game that I recall.

It seems like once a long time ago there may have been a problem with textures in CoH after a new Issue, perhaps specifically combined with a new line of nViidia cards. I think I was not affected because I did not have one of those cards. I don't think it lasted long.

I have gone through at least four nVidia cards I can remember over the course of the game's history. My current nVidia card has some issues where every couple of weeks I need to power cycle my PC to reset something weird it is doing. It's the 1st nVidia card I've had in probably 9 years that's had an issue of that sort. (It's an eVGA 570 GTX.)

I am not even sure where to start with responding to this logic, but let's try this. One of the claims from PS is that with this model they intend to provide more content per elapsed real-world time. The strong inference I take from this is that they expect this new model to make them more money, which they plan to reinvest in greater resourcing, infrastructure, etc.

Whatever their net revenue was before, if they give away so many points that they don't increase that revenue, then they won't be able to scale up to increase the rate/quality/etc of what they produce over what we had before, and from that perspective alone there would be less tangible value to us customers for PS having gone to this model.