UberGuy

Damn, this is still going on? I really expected a maintenance today to fix whatever it was. Granted, for them to do that they need to know what is wrong, but... wow. Not enthused.

Well, if one is clearly better in most situations, it's not real compelling to get the other one unless you're just into completeness for a limited number of characters. And if one is not clearly better, then again you're competing getting another T3 or T4 just for the sake of having it when you could be "incarnating" other characters, or doing something other than iTrials.

I know those thought processes don't apply to everyone, but they sure dominate how I look at it.

Now, I have gotten other destinies, but they have been things like grabbing Clarion for Hamidon raids, because I am tired of being terrorized by blue Mitos.

I have two characters that are nearly identical, other than one being a Corruptor and one being a Defender. They both have Dark Blast, Dark Miasma and Power Mastery.

I can tell you that all the things that seem to make common sense from a basic comparison of the AT modifiers hold true for those combinations. The Corruptor is more damaging, the Defender is safer. At times, that can mean that the Defender actually solos faster, because she has to spend less time/effort trying to survive and/or manage enemies. In situations where the Corruptor's mitigation abilities can keep things under control, she solos faster, because she tends to do more damage, especially against LTs, bosses and EBs.

As mentioned, anyone with what I'll call "Superman-grade" invulnerability, no matter its origin, unless it happens to suffer from a vulnerability that would be found in the blast. (I'm not sure Martian Manhunter's durability would be up to a nuke, but even if it was, it might easily qualify for his [crappy] vulnerability to fire.)

Anyone with sufficient reality-warping abilities. Various sorcerer supreme types come to mind, as do sufficiently willful Green Lanterns, and a few people with reality warping mental powers. They can effectively wish themselves the ability to survive, or wish away the negative effects of the blast, if not the entire blast itself.

Anyone with sufficiently powerful force field abilities, of any origin or explanation. Examples might be Invisible Girl or post-Pheonix Jean Gray.

Anyone with sufficiently potent energy absorption powers might be able to "eat" the damaging energy. Stormwatch's Winter comes to mind, as does Vanth Dreadstar. I believe both actually survived nukes, though, IIRC, neither had to absorb the full force of the blasts. (The one that hit Vanth Dreadstar was significantly larger than what we're discussing, but he was not at the epicenter and was inside a magical force field.)

A few entities might be physically destroyed, but able to reform, even though reduced to constituent atoms. Most examples I can think of these who aren't some sort of cosmic entity or incarnate concept are people who have already have some sort of coherent gas, energy or otherwise incorporeal "body"

Regen. The number of +HP/sec you get for Core is not even in the same ballpark.

If some widget sells for X amount of inf on a regular basis, then almost by definition, that's a sustainable price for the item. There are enough people out there both willing and able to buy the item for that price, and willing to do so instead of other ways of obtaining it, that the sales continue without people starting to undercut that price and make it fall.

Now, there are probably people out there who would like these widgets, but who can't or won't afford to pay X for them. These folks "lose out" to the people who have (and will pay) X regularly. The folks willing to pay more soak up the supply.

Once you say that no one can sell the widget for X any more, but only some number smaller than X, if your new price is low enough, you make the people who were losing out happy. They all jump in line and start buying widgets at the new, lower price. You make the people who were paying X unhappy, because now they're in line with a lot more people, and their willingness to pay X now doesn't afford them any priority on obtaining widgets. Moreover, if there aren't any more widgets being supplied on the market you get a queue - at any given time more people are now in line with the expectation of getting a widget, but widgets aren't coming in any faster.

This paradigm isn't "more fair" than the current one - it just prioritizes sales differently. Today they're prioritized by willingness and ability to pay inf, where after a cap it's prioritized by when you get in line.

Someone is always going to dislike either solution. People who prefer priority by ability to pay seem to often view it as a system where the people who work most or longest get priority on rewards. People who prefer price caps, if they've given the real market results of price caps much thought at all, seem to view it as a "better" form of equal opportunity access to goods. (Note that I am referring to actual ceilings on allowed sale prices, not competition from things like NPC stores, which some people refer to as setting price caps. That is a different thing, because an NPC store also provides additional supply.)

My priority list really looks something like this.

• Primary damage melee
• Foe Debuff
• Primary ranged damage
• Control
• Ally Buff
• Pets

So that does some strange things to AT-only lists, since powerset choices might change how you get categorized on my list there. A pet-heavy control character, or a pet heavy character that buffs allies is going to be low on my list, while a pet heavy debuffer might end up in the middle somewhere.

With that large caveat in mind, though, I can probably map my AT preference roughly like this.

• Scrapper
• Brute / melee VEAT (tie)
• Debuffing Corruptor/Defender (tie)
• Stalker
• Debuffing Controller
• Ranged, pet or hybrid VEAT, Warshade (cloudy tie)
• Tanker
• Dominator
• Blaster
• Peacebringer
• Ally buffing Corruptor/Defender (tie)
• Ally buffing Controller
• Mastermind

I think you covered two subsets there at different points in that description.

You have to remember, rsclark, that there seems to be a non-trivial number of players who do things like stop playing characters in the 30s. I have many times over the years seen the sentiment that it feels like characters don't progress significantly above that level, so getting them there is "good enough". Then there are folks who get stuff to 50, shelf it, and start something new.

Those playstyles are alien to me personally, but they definitely exist, and I don't think they're the approach of an ignorable percentage of players.

All of my heroes have started in Galaxy. But none of them live there.

I'm not sure most of my heroes would live in any part of the city proper. Most of them effectively have no secret/civilian identity, and would basically "live" in their base/lair, which they wouldn't locate in a densely populated area. The ones that do have more normal homes live in Steel Canyon or Peregrine Island.

Now that Incarnate powers are becoming more common among level 50 characters, I do think they can create a strange discontinuity in play as people start teaming with level 50s. Other than possibly there being a higher concentration of folks near level 50 who had heavily IO'd characters, there wasn't a special discontinuity in power between level someone who was level 49 (and perhaps not IO'd) and someone who was level 50. Now, even just with the Alpha slot's level shift, there can be a noticeable increase in the power of someone who's level 50. If there's just one such person on a team, they might stand out, but probably wouldn't dramatically change the whole dynamic. Get half or more of the team to have Incarnate goodies, and things can change dramatically.

Now, it doesn't really bother me, but I can grasp that people might not like that power shift in non-Incarnate content. If nothing else, it moves their cheese further and more suddenly than most other additions to the game have. However, I think the point Dechs and CrazyJerseyan may be getting at is that playing near level 50 (or teamed with level 50s) isn't the whole game. I'm not advocating that people artificially avoid playing at level 50 (unless they wanted to already), but I'm not sure how Incarnate stuff could ruin the whole game.

I do agree the Incarnate content itself is terribly grindy. You can avoid the iTrials, but I understand why that's an annoying "solution" if you still hear the siren's call of new abilities. IMO, we at least really need more content for iProgress, and the devs need to try and make sure the stuff they add is stuff enough people will enjoy that it won't be sidelined the way the community seems to have sidelined Keyes.

* Technically, if they're exemplared down, that discontinuity can drift down to levels 44 and 45, but that probably doesn't come up much.

It was apparently something that was in closed beta, but was bugged and badly breaking characters, so they backed it out to look at adding back later.

It's not just PvP. It's doing it all over the place. Missions, iTrials and a Hami raid all experienced all this wackiness.