UberGuy

Where you go to resolve DNS does not affect how you get from your machine to somewhere else. It only affects who you ask to translate the "human-readable" hostname into an IP address. When you ask to send packets to that IP address, essentially routers between you and that destination determine how to to that routing. (Thus, their designation as "routers". )

We don't need Inventions. We don't need to be level 50. That's a non-point. People want these things, and a large number of them are going to strive for them.

I simply don't agree. In brutal honesty, if they don't really want soloing one's way to this stuff to be viable, they simply shouldn't offer the option. Offering something that is, roughly based on what we're seeing discussed in this thread, 10 times less efficient is, in my opinion, going to insult people. I don't buy into the notion that offering people an alternative way to progress, no matter how unattractive is a feature worthy of note in any but the most literal of ways.

Proof is impossible here, because this is not an objective matter. Asking for proof of such a subjective situation is tantamount to trying to dismiss the discussion, because no one will ever "prove" what they enjoy or hate. This topic is a convolution of game mechanics and play preferences. Basically, the people who don't share the same preferences as the unhappy people are trying to dismiss their opinions about how they like to play, or the goals they like to pursue when they do so. There are certainly playstyles that are so far outside the norm that low performance has to be expected. Soloing in this game has not been one of those for a very long time, if ever.

To set expectations here, I am not worried about barriers to Incarnate progress for myself. I have access to a core of players who are already dominating this content. I have unlocked all four new slots on a character already, and have taken three of that character's slots to Very Rare, and the other to Rare, meaning I have both Incarnate shifts. I'm now ready to move on to another character, probably long before most people have unlocked all four slots on one character.

All that said, I still wish there was a way to make progress on the slots and shards that wasn't ridiculously slower, not because I don't want to team, but because I don't want to team all the time. I want to progress towards the new shiny, but I don't want to run Trials all day to do it. I want to do other stuff, too. And sure, technically I can do other stuff and make progress, but the rate of progress I make doing so is completely lost in the noise. It's so much slower that it's almost not even worth measuring.

I think it's notable that this is true on characters who are radically powerful. I would guess my level 50 characters are easily in the top 10% of solo performers for their AT and powersets. Despite this, the rate at which they earn any incarnate progress solo isn't just "slower" than what I earn on trials. It's so much slower that it's ignorable. It such a worse option that there is nothing that would compel me to chose it over running trials, since I have that option. If that's true for me, and my characters really are in the top 10% of performers, then 90% of the other people playing would find it even less compelling to do anything but run the new trials if they want to progress towards Incarnate abilities.

Whether I or anyone needs these abilities to play is just completely beside the point. I16's difficulty settings ensured that I can make good use of them on many characters whether I need them or not. The whole point of them being in the game is that they make our characters stronger, and stronger characters are, for me and many others, goals for their own sake. Giving us extremely narrow playstyle options for how to pursue such goals after seven years of extremely flexible choices was bound to chafe part of the player base. Some folks are being pretty darn obtuse about it, but I very much understand where at least some of them are coming from.

I only used speed runs because that's an internally consistent measure for my own experiences. The people I go with speed run both the ITF and the new trials. Now, the reality is, there isn't all that much to speed past in the BAF, and mostly the only thing we really speed past in LS is the mobs defending the sabotage objectives. That's not an inconsiderable number of critters to skip, but the point is that skipping those, I still probably average 2-3x more Threads per trial than I do Shards per ITF, and the ITF absolutely requires that we defeat some four hundred critters minimum, and all defeats are performed by the same team. (If I understand the reward mechanics correctly, we do not get a chance at Thread drops for things our team does not damage in a League.)

Unless you're the only one there.

This strikes me as an odd perspective in this forum, where we often agonize over a few DPS solo damage output.

Edit: It seems to me that there are a lot of variables that will affect which version works out to more DPS. How high your previous DPS was, and how many attacks/time you use to get there (because that affects how often you will apply the DoT). If you are on the low end of DPS the DoT is almost certainly a win. If you are high DPS and have sufficiently fast-activating powers, it seems to me that the -DR could come out ahead. For mowing standard mobs down, the DoT is almost certainly the better choice. However, I have to say I rarely optimize at this level for anything except hard targets.

I feel like I'm missing something here. This looks like it is saying that Shards drop five times more often that Threads? I don't know what the actual ratio of the probabilities is, but I'm certain Threads drop significantly more often than Shards. I get probably 2-6 Threads per trial (not counting any breakdowns). I get something like 0-4 Shards per speed run of an ITF, which I think is actually a lot more required defeated mobs than either new trial.

When someone wins the lottery more than once, is that random?

No, what you have a problem with has nothing to do with whether the table you get is random. "Random" means you have no control over what table you get. It's based on a random number. That it is random has nothing to do with the appropriateness of the labels applied to the tables. Simply because the "uncommon" table appears more frequently than the "common" table does not mean the way it does so is not random.

For what it's worth, on the topic of the components being "common", "rare", etc., this really has always been problematic, even in the Inventions system. For example, every single Pool B (mission end drop) recipe is "Rare"... which is pretty clearly hooey if you look at the supplies of them at level 50 on the market. (In fact, we think they are evenly weighted, so that every one of them is as likely to drop at mish complete as all the others, meaning that none of them is rare.)

It's really best to just think of the Incarnate "rarity" labels to be indicative of how hard or easy they are to obtain, not how frequently they appear in the reward window.

How is this not random? Is this another one of those things where someone is defining random as "equally likely"?

The reward window you get is random. It is heavily weighted towards giving you the "uncommon" reward window. "Rare" and "Very Rare" are correspondingly less likely to appear. "Common" is also less likely to appear than "Uncommon", presumably because it's not a very good reward. The window with 10 threads, which I have not yet seen and is incredibly sucktastic, is apparently extremely unlikely, as this is the first I've heard of it after dozens of runs with full leagues.

That doesn't sound like anything I've ever seen them say. They've always said it was about the time invested in something like that to create something people would burn past in a matter of days.

What you're describing sounds more like why they said they wouldn't increase the fly speed cap, not the level cap.

Actually, I'm fairly sure this is exactly how it's supposed to work.

Now, I can see this perhaps being a problem in regular content, because it would be pretty incompatible with the way SSK works. However, inside Incarnate specific content, which is level gated at 50 anyway, it only separates people who have different degrees of level shift. I'm not immediately concerned about that prospect.

For those of you considering Incarnate stuff "optional," I don't think that means what it sounds like you think it means. I don't think there's any promise on the table that you aren't going to need some existing Incarnate progress to be useful (if granted access at all) for future Incarnate content. It's "optional" in the sense that other, non-Incarnate content exists and will continue to be created, but I don't think it's safe to assume it will be optional internal to the Incarnate content itself.

No, it's really not. In addition to any buffs, the critters have 14% higher base toHit attribute than standard mobs in the rest of the game.

The Core version is a 100% chance of the debuff, meaning that after four hits, you're guaranteed a 10% debuff (unless you have to stop hitting for some reason). I don't think that's beneath notice. Also, bear in mind that all these limited stacking debuffs are achieved by granting the target a temp power that it applies to itself. That means these debuffs don't follow the "purple patch" behavior - You'll apply the full debuff to a foe of any level you can hit.

I'm taking this on my high-sustained-DPS melee characters.

It will stack on a given target four times, total, no matter how many people apply it to them. These debuffs work similarly to how the Achilles Heel proc does, which is that they grant the target a temp power, and the target uses that temp power (involuntarily) to debuff themselves. Powers like this have a limit on number of copies one can have in place, and in this case the limit would be 4. So no matter how many people apply the temp power to them, they can't stack more than four at once.

Sadly it's this. You lose access to unused slots when the store is offline. I believe this also includes slots obtained via veterans rewards.

In fact, when the "one-shot code" was implemented, this was exactly how it was billed as intended to work. That plan did not come to fruition.

On topic, I don't have a huge intrinsic issue with being one-shotted, but it can be frustrating if it's too consistent. The core principle here is that I think players should feel they have a chance to do something to avoid being defeated. I don't think it's kosher to overuse encounter design where the foes are designed to squash Tanker-level defenses with raw damage dealt as AoEs large enough to catch every "soft" AT in the general vicinity. The lightning AoE from Statesman in the Recluse SF is a good example of what I feel is borderline overkill on this sort of thing. Marauder really doesn't bother me, because (as mentioned) he gives quite fair warning - the player can, in fact, do something to avoid the one-shot.

Broadly speaking, in this game I don't think "one-shotting" is overly frequent, but basically only because they did give us the "one-shot code" protections. I think the devs need to pay a bit more attention to new, super-damaging effects that will explicitly bypass the way the one-shot protections actually work, where muti-typed damage and fast DoTs basically do mean one attack kills you before you (or anyone) can react.

Impressive. I think the last thread we had on this had the top inf earners hitting something like 30M/hour. If that was indeed before I16, they should be hitting around 60M/hour, all other things being equal. Of course, all things aren't actually equal, with Incarnate level shifts being an obvious recent one. Still, on its own that would only take that 60M number up to around 80M/hour, so if a bad farmer is making 120M/hour, the vogue in good farming has improved significantly.