UberGuy

Not that you can't get some good suggestions here if previous posters give you feedback, but you can definitely find good stuff on that in the Scrapper forum. Katana/Regen is a comfortable glove for some of the game's most prolific Scrapper numbers hounds.

Take a gander at this thread. The discussion is about building the Lamborghini of Kat/Regens, but even if you don't want to push the envelope as hard as the posters there are trying, it should give you some good ideas. It also delves into what Incarnate powers can work best, and why.

It's kind of long and gets number heavy, but some of the Scrapper boards' best contributors have posted in there.

Well, I disagree. While we can quibble over whether they chose the right degree, I like the fact that there's overlap where my new powers work in both the new content and the old content. "Progress" has a very hollow feeling to me if it's attached to a place and not to my character. Separate from all the discussion about what happens when I run TFs or other content under the exemplar rules, when my level 50 IO'd character ventures from Peregrine Island to Atlas Park, they still have the powers of a level 50 with all their IOs. I would have much reduced sense of achievement if I only got to be a level 50 in PI. So too I would not like if I constantly lost my Incarnate powers when I left Praetorea. I think that would suck rocks.

We'll see what they do with future slots. I'm genuinely curious. I honestly do expect some sort of limits, but I'm not sure it makes sense for them to only work in iTrials or other Incarnate content. To part of the point in Sam's recent posts, that content is going to be very limited. I think the devs will shoot themselves in the foot if they give us powers that only work in very limited contexts. Even for most ladder-climbing power gamers, that's not very attractive.

Sharktopus.

I wouldn't buy one for real money, no. It's not that hard for me to get them in game, and they work well enough for how I play that spending this kind of money for them just doesn't make sense. That's not a complaint. I think they should be priced such that only certain people will by them, or there'd be no reason to have the ways we have to get them in game.

Um. Global email works. You even mention it. So they are account bound. I don't know how you turned that into a rant about lack of account based storage. I'd like some too, but the fact is we do have a way to transfer these things.

I don't know why folks are disagreeing with what I said, and then repeating it slightly differently.

I'm going to assume perhaps people are getting hung up on the word "claim"? "Claim" is being used very specifically here: after you buy it from the Paragon Market, you can claim that purchase exactly once: I was trying to make clear that you can't buy them and have some sort of per-character font of Touch of Death enhancements. You can buy a set and claim it from the Market with one character, and then it's claimed and you have enhancements.

Once you claim them, you can mail them to other characters on the same account. That includes the examples of unslotting them and moving them to someone else later. I'm not sure what I said in my original response that made folks think I was excluding that possibility.

Which is why I said

Well, if I recall correctly, one of the reasons for picking vBulletin was so that they have a support contract with the maker. What's broken down here with that support process is of course unclear without word from a redname, which probably isn't likely.

Most of my heroes (and all of my villains) have a pretty simple solution to this. While they all have given birth names separate from their costumed identity, they don't actually have a meaningful civilian identity. They don't hang out that much with normal people. Most who live like this either have no immediate living ancestors or siblings, or have severed ties with such. If they have a significant other, it's usually another metahuman.

The Rikti War is a convenient excuse for a lot of people with no non-super families, let alone the dozens of unfortunate ways one can meet their end to more terrestrial villain groups. (If you live on the Rogue Isles, god only knows what might have befallen your family.) So mostly only the heroes with family ties and/or a non-metahuman family really need a secret identity.

You'd be wrong on most counts where you're guessing what I want. I'm one of a few players that's been willing to play mostly the same 8-10 level 50 characters for the past several years, making what a lot of players here would consider very slow progress on building those characters out using the Inventions system. My goals have been very much on the horizon.

Here's the problem comparing that progress to the Incarnate system. I could do pretty much anything and make progress towards my Inventions goals. Doing pretty much anything will earn me inf, though some things earn me more than others. Any TF or story arc will earn me Reward Merits.

For the Incarnate system, we got two, then four pieces of Incarnate Trial content to run that could earn Incarnate progress. You need at least 7 other people, but usually 11 other people to join you - you can't just log in and make progress whenever you want. You can't trade or email Incarnate progress - no earning it on one character and passing it around. And the latter two pieces of content? Not very popular right now.

Even at 20 iTrials to chose, the other restrictions on Incarnate progress would limit it compared to what I did with Inventions, which I did much more slowly. I could make my Inventions progress at a pace I set, because I wasn't dependent on finding 10-20 other people. It is that requirement that makes it important that each iTrial be meaningfully rewarding. For many of us, getting on an iTrial is not a convenient process. We can't do it whenever we want, like we can earn XP or inf. If an inconvenient process is not tangibly rewarding, not as many people will do it. Since the whole thing is predicated on people doing it, that creates negative feedback, and the whole system can collapse.

Now, you could say that the devs could have taken a different design route entirely. They could have produced a slower pace of content more similar to what we already had in terms of TFs and story arcs, with a different system of attaining Incarnate powers more gradually, but with more control for the individual player over pace of earnings. A lot of players probably would have liked that, though I can't know if it was a majority. If it offered more personal control over pace, I probably would prefer it to iTrials.

But even I have to admit, that wouldn't have the same marketing edge the iTrials do. I can see the lure of something that got more of the Incarnate powers system out there in play with less dev-produced content. It's not as attractive to the modern MMO audience to introduce a new system that will take many months to progress even to the midway point in. So we got something based around leagues of up to 24 people that then moves at a pace more brisk than what you think it should. We'll get more content with more individual degree of progress control sometime in the future. We don't know what that content's target progress pacing will be, but it will have to exist in the shadow of the pacing set by the iTrials, which need to be non-trivial pacing to convince people to form multi-team leagues. What's "non-trivial" is highly subjective, but even you admit your idea of it doesn't mesh well with a lot of customer expectations. That's a problem, when you need to convince the customer to participate, or the whole thing breaks down.

Once you buy them, you can only claim them once, on one character. If you want them for another character, you need to buy them again. "Account bound" means you can't trade them to a character off of your account. They can't go in storage bins, be sold, etc.

In my case, I don't offer build advice on every AT, because I don't play all of them enough to feel I have the knowledge to. I don't find it compelling to look in a forum full of cross-AT posts. I just look for questions or whatnot in the AT forums for the ATs I'm most familiar with.

I'd rather see something like this be more of a virtual view onto threads from the other forums that are somehow "tagged" as build suggestion/feedback threads. That way the threads could be created in the AT forums and anyone who wanted to view the whole thing in bulk could just look here.

People wanting to post new threads would need to pick a forum to do it in. I think with the right heading label on the virtual subforum, that wouldn't be too confusing.

Games did that for a decade or two. They found out it made for more happier players if it wasn't like that. Substitute "level whatever" for "Incarnated out".

Doing otherwise helps keep people going. They go back to the well to work on the next shiny.

For those who have a sour taste, perhaps. I don't find this cake particularly sour.

Getting 2-3 Tier 4s and 1-2 Tier 3s takes, on average, around 50 trials. I happen to think that's a lot, given that we're only half way there.

The same arguments have been used in the past about 50s. Maybe you didn't like the changes there, either, but the overall direction seems pretty clear. Long-haul grinds are not the way forward.


Why? I mean, that's fine and all that you would design a game that way, but what about it makes it better other than that you'd like it to work that way?

Honestly, unless they're dirt cheap, or you're rolling in money, I don't think it makes much sense to buy them.

If you're going to exemplar a lot and/or just cannot stand to try and get low-level IOs in game (and I will concede they're not convenient to get on the market), and you've got the cash to spend on them? Go nuts. It's money that supports the game.

I min max a fair bit, and I've got a significant disposable income. I wouldn't buy these on the market unless they were like a buck a set or something like that. Even that seems high to me for as many as I'd want. I've got all the ToDs and the like I need at the moment, and would never dream of replacing them for real money, even for the exemplar benefit. Of course, I also mostly play at 50, but even when I exemplar, I simply don't worry about what happens to most of my sets. My characters are still overpowered unless I'm forced below level 20 or so. It's only special IOs with "set-bonus-like" effects like LotGs and the like that I bother to buy at minimum level. (And I'm not interested in store-bought LotGs, either, were they even available. The % enhancement difference in a L25 LotG and a level 50 one is very small, and even five them them sprinkled around a build is only likely to affect your overall performance if you were within a few percent of a softcap.)

So overall, I can't see people rushing out and buying these by the cartload unless PS sets the price very low, or unless someone is loaded. Setting the price very low would probably be dumb. And if someone loaded wants to throw money at the game I like to play, more power to them, literally.

Indeed. I also think it was mostly a wash. My own leaning is that builds are probably slightly more diverse, where "diversity" is defined in terms of a majority of builds having slightly different combinations of powers. But even if I'm wrong about that, I do, indeed, believe the worst case change in diversity is zero, not a negative number.