UberGuy

I'm someone with lots of access to TF teams, I play a lot, and my characters have high-powered builds. I tend not to alt heavily. In other words, I'm kind of a poster child for the kind of player the Incarnate system seems be easiest for.

All that said, I feel these numbers for the Notice conversion look high. Not the inf cost - I actually think that is a good number. The shard cost seems high to me. I say this from a couple of perspectives.

One perspective is from the that of a strong soloer, and when I'm not on TFs, I solo stuff. I run my 50s on high team size settings with bosses enabled. I have been pretty comfortable with my shard acquisition rates. I think it would take me a long time to collect the shard numbers shown in the screenshot, especially for slots past Alpha. The numbers shown make me very glad I'm not hard-core about my soloing desires.

Another perspective is looking at how I could use these crafting facilities to speed up my own Incarnate progress. I've been taking the teaming route for my Alpha slot, getting my components from TFs instead of crafting most of them from Shards. (The exception is the component from the CoP.) Partially based on what feels like common sense* and partially on what Black Scorpion posted, I would expect some increased in efficiency for mixing and matching the "solo friendly" and "team-centric" progress facilities. However, assuming the WST does indeed stay in place, I am not really seeing much gain in dipping into this crafting option. That strikes me as a bit lopsided. The "soloist" approach benefits immensely from any willingness to go on TFs, but those with ready access to TFs see marginal benefit from accessing the "soloist" facilities. Don't get me wrong - I can see why that may be intentional, but it seems like there could be more wiggle room. I'm not just saying that from a position of self interest because I want to go faster. If the options are so lopsided that I see basically no value in dipping into the crafting route, I think that might say something about what happens if you try to use that as your primary route.

Don't misunderstand my position here. I think it's reasonable that focusing on soloing this progress is less efficient. I am only questioning the degree to which it looks to be less efficient based on these early numbers, and absent any other possible ways to progress which have not yet been revealed.

* Bearing in mind that seeming "common sense" is highly subjective and not always very "common" at all.

This was brought up in a thread in another section of the forums, but while I know there are people who run at the lowest settings that will get them drops, I don't personally know farmers who do that. I know a fair number of people who farm, either hardcore or occasionally. The issue they see is one of short-term gratification. Windfalls from drops are at the mercy of the RNG - you can go days without getting something good. A single decent purple can make up for that in an instant, but until that happens, the well can feel very dry. We're sometimes talking about people who have posted in here raking in 60M/hour in defeats alone, so it's not really chump change, and keeping the defeat inf rates helps them feel like the well has some kick in it between windfalls.

There's a practical, min/max aspect to it, too. Primarily because of how AoEs work in CoH, there may be little practical difference in how fast a character with strong AoEs can defeat +0 versus +2 or even +3 foes. There's no real point in lowering your foe's level if it doesn't actually translate into meaningful kill speed increases - one might as well leave their difficulty higher and accept the extra cash.

As you say, I think none of us have any real idea how many people do what, but I am not at all sure that most farmers run at lower difficulty settings. Too many I meet in game and who post in this forum have done otherwise.

Going back to the Musculature comment, I did take it on one Scrapper - a BS/Invul. He doesn't have endurance problems, and I didn't see big value in Cardiac for just the extra damage resist. The biggest bang for him is probably Spiritual, but he's got decent though not amazing +rech from sets and Hasten. Recharge is good for high DPS attack chains, but Broadswords animations kind of choke that early compared to a lot of other sets. The only thing for him that seems to majorly benefit from lots of recharge is Dull Pain, and on average I am close to perma with it now. Ultimately, though, I wanted to try something different - I have a bunch of other melee characters who I gave Spiritual to. Broadsword's appeal, for me, is the steady "crunch", and it seemed that Spiritual was moderate enough in benefit to him that Musculature was attractive for making that "crunch" louder.

When I was talking about Incarnate abilities increasing our combat efficiency, I was thinking of things like how Spiritual and Cardiac can increase how much DPS we can output or how many toggles we can run without running out of end. I was also thinking of things seen when other, currently unannounced slots were leaked to test that outright would improve DPS or act as direct attacks.

But I've realized that level shifting introduces a source of absolutely pure inflation, defined as an increase in money supply with no corresponding increase in recipe or salvage supply.

I imagine this was pretty obvious to some. I actually did realize it was inflationary, but hadn't thought about how direct the effect can be. For those for whom it isn't obvious, consider the following example.

Imagine some level 50 character, who the owner of likes to play against +2 and +3 foes. Over some long term, lets say that this character can average X mob defeats per hour. It doesn't matter what X is, or really over what term we measure it. We just need to know that for any given set of conditions (foe type, number of foes, etc.) this character can defeat X foes per unit time. This then translates into some number of Inf generated per hour, and also some rate of pool A and purple drops per hour, and maybe also some rate of Merit production.

Now this level 50 character gets his Rare level shift. Existing foes become effectively one level lower to him. To keep up his challenge, he bumps the level of foes he fights - his missions now have +3 and +4 foes in them. These foes now act exactly like the +2 and +3 foes he fought before. The net effect on his defeat rate, X, should be exactly zippo. He should be defeating mobs at the same rates he did before.

But now, even though fighting it feels just like it did before, each mob of a given con color is worth more Inf than it was before. (I tried to find a reference for the ratios, but didn't come up with one handily. Maybe I'll dig it up in-game tonight.) So our character is producing more inf/time for the same activities at the same level of challenge and rate of progress. Most importantly, though, since his defeat rate ostensibly didn't increase, neither does his rate of drop production, or, presumably, any production rates for our various merits. (Note, though, that AE Ticket rates are linked to mob level, and so their production rate would actually increase if the player used the AE.)

There's a big assumption here that's that the player would actually increase their difficulty to counteract their level shift. I'm certain not everyone would do that, but I know lots of people who have done so for their non-TF team play, so I do suspect it's common if not a majority approach. (TF speed runners look prone to leaving their settings low and burning through TFs even faster, so this will tend to mitigate inflationary effects on Reward Merit item production.) As long as a non-trivial proportion of the population ups their foe levels in step with their level shifts, it will tend towards inflationary effect. At least until we run out of level bumps to give our foes.

I have never been one to play anthropomorphic animal characters, but whether I ever do or not, I'm impressed with the heads and legs shown in the trailer. I think they really look good.

Kudos to whoever made them.

It not only says "any two rare", it shows lines linking the slots. Compare those lines on the web page to the ones in the in-game crafting window.

The ones on the web page show a link only between the Radial Rares and the Radial Very Rare, and the Core Rares and the Core Very Rare. The clear implication I take from that is that a Core Very Rare can only be crafted by having both Core Rares, which would be wrong.

The fact that it is drawn that way and says "any two rares" is not only doubly misleading, it's self contradictory.

The web-page version of the tree is helpful, but it is also misleading. The lines from the Rare slots to the Very Rare slots clearly suggest that the Very Rares require the two Rares directly above them. This is not the case.

The flier has always dropped the bombs. Their seeking AI has always been a little odd, and it doesn't spam them, so it's easy to imagine you never noticed them. I've never seen the flier get "stuck" like that.

Recluse occasionally does phase when being buffed by the towers. The teams I run with regularly leave the blue tower up, and when it buffs him he becomes "UNAFFECTED". I don't know if this is unique to the blue tower, or if any tower would do this. I don't think he does this when all the towers are down.

It's quite likely that Recluse has high taunt resistance, especially when buffed. This would help explain why it's easy to lose his aggro. The occasioonal phasing would then contribute to this.

I noticed an Arachnos spawn come running in one of the STFs I was on this last week. Since we don't take down all the towers, I have no idea what triggered it. I only noticed it once, and I definitely thought it was odd.

I had one laggard 50 who did not have the Alpha Slot unlocked until yesterday, mostly because I wanted to solo Ramiel's arc with him, but I had unslotted most of his enhancers for an I19 respec, and had not yet replaced them.

Now that all my 50s are unlocked, I plan to have all nine of them with the very rare slotted once we've had enough WSTs to acquire four Notices of the Well.

This is relatively easy for me to plan on, because I have access to regular TF teams who can complete the existing TFs without much in the way team formation gyrations.

My biggest problem with the Dark Servant is that I often can't kill it. It crushes my toHit in melee with it barring Focused Accuracy (and I have 'specced out of FA on all my characters currently in preference for Tactics - usually to get to Vengeance), and most of my ranged attacks are currently negative damage (Soul Mastery). On the upside, it doesn't last nearly as long as a real Dark Miasma Dark Servant, and MIs don't resummon it as soon as it expires. Thus, I often end up doing drive-bys on the MI until the DS expires.