UberGuy

Um, I think that's preposterous.

Anything you can do without following instructions is something you might as well faceroll. I'm OK with this game being mostly face-rollable, because it is, and I like this game. But I see nothing wrong with content where you have to follow instructions or seriously risk failure. I'm sorry, but if someone can't listen to instructions, I am going to look down on them. That's true in the game, at work, and in life in general.

Maybe. It's a pretty big zone. I think there will be plenty of spawns. When you're street sweeping in normal zones, the limited supply of stuff to fight comes from the fact that most zones have a range of critter levels, and we generally only want to fight stuff in a 1-3 level band. Based on my understanding of the revamp, DA will be different from every other zone prior in that particular regard - everything will be level 54, and therefore a viable target for a level 50.*

I've wanted a zone like that for a long time.

* This does assume nothing wandering around in the open zone has a level shift. That might not be a safe assumption.

Sadly, by stopping reading here we reach a well-worn sterotype about one of our most populous servers.

People demand things I think are dumb when they lead trials all the time. Personally, I carefully ignore them whenever possible. As in, as long as I am sure I am not going to cause the problem that person is trying to avoid, I do what they said not to do anyway, when it is actually helpful to do so. (I don't do it just to be contrary.)

That's a needless self restriction. All you need to to is point out to the leader that you shouldn't be devoted to fighting Seers, assuming your league assigns anyone to that. (Many do not.) The notion that AoE-centric characters are no good in the entire trial is mistaken.

While I am not a fan of the "don't do this or your league can fail", I don't think you can draw this conclusion from its presence in the TPN. The general rule is simple, if you rely primarily on AoEs for damage, don't fight the Seers - go inside and fight the IDF. There's never any good reason to hold back AoEs when fighting Maelstrom outside. So unless someone is dense or refuses to read team chat, barring the occasional misfire, this simply should not be a problem.

There are a bunch of things that annoy people about the TPN. The noisiest complaint I see on the forums is generally this notion of civilians doing grievous harm to supers using rocks. (Let's not devolve into discussing that here, there's at least one whole thread on it.) It's definitely repetitive, though if you rack up Public Opinion rapidly, it is less so. I personally find being ganked by Maelstrom while moving from building to building incredibly annoying - when it happens there's nothing I can do about it, and that's never fun. But overall, I don't find the trial poorly designed in a mechanical sense. I find it a decent trial with a few things that I wish worked or were presented differently. I find its rewards excellent.

At this point, I don't think the "solo" path needs to offer "bad" progress rates. It just needs to be less good than running down the list of iTrials. Right now, with six trials, the rate of available Incarnate progress is, frankly, very high. If there is regular access to all the iTrials except perhaps MoM, I can run a few trials a night and pretty easily have at least all T3s in the level-shifting slots on a character in about a week. If things are really moving and I devote several hours to it, I can earn 10 Empyrean merits in a night of play. Remember, a Rare Incarnate Salvage piece costs 8 Empyrean Merits to craft outright with zero Inf cost. A Very Rare costs 30.

The above does assume you have regular access to non-failing leagues. Leagues I attend or lead do succeed more than they fail by a decent margin - probably at least 9:1. The new 60 thread mid-trial reward for the TPN and UGT also provide an absolutely amazing boost to how fast you can craft your way to a Rare (or VR), though the UGT thread reward needs to be fixed so that you get it for all successes against the WWs.

So basically, the DA-based progress could be set somewhere down below but even somewhat near where things were when all we had were BAF and Lambda, and iTrials would still be a lot faster, but DA-based progress would not suck. I would totally still do iTrials, because I do not hate them and I covet that fast progress, but I would totally use DA when I wanted to work on an Incarnate but there weren't enough people around to form an iTrial (which is pretty much any time before around 4 PM US/Central most days on Justice).

Edit: By the way, if the progress rates on offer there are not glacial, I do think DA is going to be the new place to form iTrials. I just don't see the point in going to RWZ or PD. If you're waiting for an iTrial, right now you're forced to stand around doing nothing. Once DA becomes an Incarnate progress zone, you can fight stuff there while waiting and potentially earn something while doing so. If the DA makeover comes bundled with the ability to run door missions while in the LFG queue, this is even better, though the LFG queue itself will still need some functional improvements, IMO. I expect most league leaders to try to fill a league on a direct invite basis, not with the queue, because only by direct invite can you see what you're getting, and the UGT, TPN and especially MoM do require you to pay at least some attention to what's on your league.

Everyone has to choose between ongoing progress and working on new characters. Irrespective of the form of that progress, that's a fundamental choice everyone has to make - play an existing character to progress it or play a new character and perhaps get it to where the existing character already is.

Imagine the devs had performed a major miracle and produced 50 more levels of content, setting a new level cap at level 100. Imagine it took, on average, 75 hours of play per character to get a level 50 to level 100. If you had 20 level 50s that's 1500 hours of play.

The only ways to make it "easy" to achieve getting every character you might have to level 100 is to have few characters or to make getting to level 100 trivial. The former doesn't apply to you, and few devs in any PvE-focused game would likely willingly let the latter happen.

Heh. You should spell her name right if you mean to give proper credit.

Seconded on both points.

The only one I really hate the badge requirements for are Keyes, because one person can so easily mess it up for everyone.

That's true to some extent for a number of badges, including the "classic" Master of Badges, but the Keyes version seems much more fragile than just "don't die". The Bombs badge in Underground suffers a little bit from this, but mostly people who fail this for leagues that are really trying to get it are the sort who refuse to listen to instruction. The only other iTrial badge I have a dislike for is the "collect 'em all" badge for the MoM trial, because it's just random and repetitive. I much prefer the badges that take some sort of good play.

You have to be careful here. This is one of those cases where correlation and causation can't be clearly linked.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, there is a single, 24-man iTrial, and it's actually well-liked by people who don't have an intrinsic dislike of large league content. Then the devs add, say, two TFs that use Incarnate reward system. They're both reasonably liked. Now imagine you're not on one of the top population servers.

There's only so many people playing 50s and looking to run iContent. Those people can now get in one iTrial or two iTFs. It's just going to be easier to get into the TFs, because they're easier to start. The more people who do that, the fewer people will be available for the 24-man trial. This has a negative feedback effect - the longer it takes to form the trial, the more people will simply opt for the TFs.

To counter this, you need one of two things. One option is that the iTrial needs to be a lot more fun than the TFs. That's pretty subjective, and could be read to imply that the TFs shouldn't be made as fun as the iTrial - something we wouldn't want the devs to set forth as a design goal. The other option (and the more realistic one, IMO) is to make the iTrial have a noticeably better reward than the TF.

As an aside, and IMO, the devs have done a good job tweaking the rewards for the existing iTrials so that I do very much want to run the longer ones instead of just the BAF/Lambda. I consider the reward for the longer ones to be excellent. (Well, other than the bug for the 60 threads in the Undeground - fortunately leagues I'm on usually hit the criteria for "Regenerate This", but not always.)

I've fought IDF at +4/x8 with IOs and incarnate powers. It wasn't easy (I had to take it slow), and did involve several deaths in a single mission.

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but I think that means it's achievable with SOs at something like +1/x6, as long as you're playing something that can solo reasonably to start with.

Vanguard are rather binary. Either they're a big PITA, or you can roll over them. It's usually control-heavy characters that can peel them.

Threadjack. I see this posted all the time, and it frustrates the hell out of me, because people try it in ignorance, and waste everyone's time. This is a big oversimplification. This approach to the trial is more successful when you have sufficient buffs (and maybe AoE DPS) to be able to ignore the telepathist's debuffs.

I have been on TPNs where this was not the case, and people ignored the Telepathists. The league got its collective derriere popped off, made into a nice garnish, and fed back to it with a hollandaise sauce. Edit: To be clear, the debuff from the Telepathists weakened the league to the point that the IDF was much more dangerous than normal, because they were hitting far more often and far harder than normal. It had nothing to do with being outside or with Maelstrom.

This tactic is fine if your league has the right composition in terms of having some folks along to counter the debuffs with their own buffs. That's not a generically true statement about all leagues.

Oh, you've reported a completely valid bug/complaint, IMO. We're just offering a solid work-around. There's no way on earth it should be cool that closed leagues work this way. In fact, they didn't always do this. They broke them in this particular way a couple of patches after they were first released.

This.

What appears to happen is that the 1st few fastest people to zone in get on the 1st and maybe 2nd team, and then everyone else ends up on their own team. There's a suspicion among players I know that anyone who would be slotted into their own team after there are already 6 gets booted from the event.

Don't lock the event. Not the teams, that has nothing to do with it. There's an option on the LFG window that the leader sets for locking the event. Don't do it.

The worst that happens with open events is that the team order may get jumbled, but that's it. People within the teams stay in the same relative positions, so the team leaders are preserved in those spots. And, as far as I know, no one gets kicked.

To be fair, I personally notice a significantly larger number of requests for new melee and/or armor powerset concepts than I see, for example, ranged attack powersets.

Also, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that there are a lot more visually distinct melee fighting styles than there are visually distinct projectile launcher styles. Most of the current distinction in ranged attacks is about what the ranged attacker is tossing, where a lot of the variety in melee sets is less about what, but how.

Contrast this with melee attack sets. For most of the existing melee attack sets, we have significant repetition in what we are attacking with - they all down to hitting people with a fist, an elemental effect, or a melee weapon. But when you focus on the powersets with shared weapon type - bare hand/fist or swords, what distinguishes them are different visual attack styles. What makes the sets distinct is how we hit foes with them - and then how the devs translate that into a distinct powerset mechanic.

I honestly think that the prevalence of melee powersets comes down to the devs giving us a lot of the things we ask for.

The problem with leaving the Telepaths alone isn't the loss of ratings, it's the debuff. Five of them unmolested is -30% defense and -30% DR. It's possible to offset this with buffs, but it's only reasonable to adopt this strategy if you know going in that your league has this sort of buffing available. Going in while ignoring the Telepathists on a league that can't offset the debuffs results in ugly wipes against the IDF, which then tends to lead to a rather binary failure because wiped leagues don't clear terminals fast.

Long story short, take stock of the buffs and incarnate shifts of your league before deciding on this strat. It can work, but it doesn't work automatically.