reiella

Phipps made me feel like a toadie, not so much a villain tbh.

Well, by the same token most people didn't like to think of their natural martial arts heroes attaching grenades to their feet to get better accuracy.

To prevent jousting mostly.

I much prefer travel suppression to the previous solution of 20% accuracy nerf while the power was on.

There's also the problem that generally, you don't win in the long term. Which sucks, that said, I like AE and the other potential for villainy quite a bit. Sure it's a more enclosed system, but it sorta has to be, because when the villain is dictating the story, well the other players don't really care .

Maybe instead of redside, it's the undeadside...

That sounded better in my head.

No... it didn't.

That actually was one of the really awkward complaints about the aggro cap, aoe target caps, and gdn iirc.

Lot of characters felt 'super' [godlike works here too] being the guy who laughed at the 100s of critters smacking into them.

It'd be nice to see those sort of elements crop up again.

I imagine it has a few issues.

First, Primal has vastly more supers than any of the other dimensions. Praetoria has a lot, no mistake, but Primal has a Damned Lot. So it's easier to contain.

Second, Praetorian Hamidon acted earlier in their history and was able to get established before really threatened. Now, Praetorian Hamidon didn't want to act as early as he did, but was 'forced' to by the reality of the wars going on. More pointed though, I see Hamidon's growth/power as being a geometric progression [Game of Life and all that] so the headstart helped him out a lot more than here.

Really wish I could get the music by itself for this game [in general]. I have to play with sound off because the humming from my shields on most of my characters drives me nuts.

To be fair though, we're talking about SuperHero micro-skirts. That's practically the same as forgetting to wear any pants .

Depends a lot on your luck. As Sam points out, 'To do what?' is a valid question.

If you want the stuff that's locked behind E-Merits, yes you will need to do a bit more than 30 Trials.

And if the RNG isn't your friend, 30 trials at least for a T4 [if that is your goal, I'd also direct you to Arcanaville's posts regarding T4 being a stretch goal].

Further, my controller who started going through the grind after 20.5 has done about 30 trials already, and has only unlocked Judgement so far [Interface is close at least]. This is due to the iXP share issue, yes, but it is still a real factor now.

To be honest, personally, the best for me was when they introduced the automatic Boss->Lt downgrade -Way Back-.

Kinda sucked when I was leveling up my controller back then and pretty much couldn't advance in this one story arc [blue side] because there were two fixed bosses in one encounter group.

I actually think the secret of the Cole/Hami stare-down is supposed to be some big 'woah' moment for the praetorian storyline. If that's true or not, who knows, but that's the intent, at least for the praetorian population.

Given that powersets are going to be mostly uncoupled from alignment with I21 as well, I think it's mostly going to have to be content and culture.

I doubt we'll see a 'focus' on redside content either, best can hope for is matched or shared content, which is fine.

Something that may have been helpful to remember when posting that earlier. That was without Power Boost :/, thanks to the new group buffs that should be reliable to have up on my Singy.

Moves defense up to ~32.6% from shields, then another 12.7% from Dispersion. So bleh ~45%, which leaves me again wondering. Of course, with trials, the soft cap is a closer to 59 or 60, so it would be useful there... Hmm.

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Of course, on trials, it's very unlikely for my singy to only have my buffs, so again graaah, guess will just have to play with it.

To be fair, most of that problem would mostly resolve itself if the LFG tool were usable.

I really just hope [perhaps foolishly] that it's reasonably possible for the devs to make the LFG tool usable while enjoying other content.

ProgressQuest!

A fair point, what I am suggesting though is that Incarnate stuff is Cosmic-level.

And while we did have a few solo instances going on with the various Infinity sagas, those were mostly for characters that were at the Cosmic range of power in the first place. The problem is while you can support some cosmic level actors/characters going solo in such a story, you can't have the vast majority of characters be cosmic without it getting silly.

Now there is a very good point to be made that as we, the characters, advance along that incarnate scale, we're really approaching the cosmic power level range. And it would be more justified to have some more solo cosmic level interaction. Then, you run into problems with the Massively Multiplayer nature [which admittedly already exist with the plot as is] and that's just posing the question of how interesting/significant the Infinity Wars would be if everyone were Adam Warlock or Thanatos, yes, even Toad wielding the powers of the Eternity.

That isn't to say there's no room for the 'non-cosmics' to have their own content with that story line, that certainly happened with the Infinity Wars/crossovers. I'd contend that it happens in CoX with some of the existing arcs and the new TFs. Could it use more? Certainly. Right now, it's awkward because the Incarnate Storyline and the Praetoria storyline are related but not necessarily the same, so there will be some intersection.

I did think of another wrinkle with regards to non-cosmics in the cosmic arcs, it's very rare for any of the non-cosmics to actually get to keep the power they gained (more akin to the Blood Coral line I'd say). And that would hardly work for a 'progression' based end game. That said, I dunno . Not good answers there.

The problem I see with incarnate-explicit content that isn't in the Trials is I see a real problem with solo content requiring someone be an incarnate. For instance, I really dislike the Alpha slot requirement with Apex and Tin Mage, it's really really annoying. It's more tolerable since 8man is pretty much a small raid for other vendors, but it's still really annoying. And then you have to face the issue that the game is pretty unbalanced in terms of relative power to make it seem reasonable that the content 'requires you to be an incarnate' versus 'this content is too difficult for me to complete on my own even when I am an incarnate'. And well, I dislike the Alpha slot 'method' that was used in Apex/Tin Mage.

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A thought, I'd really like to see AE get some additional functionality with Incarnate abilities and the like. That way, folks could have their own crafted stories that meaningfully utilize their incarnate abilities. However, it'd unfortunately need to have no 'additional' rewards. So it'd just be self-story fest, but :/

Prolly the same reason no one noticed Croatoa was so magical until the gnomes went nuts. Unobtanium!

The only exception I'd toss in there would be traditional trials. Since they also have a time constraint going on.

[Ustream reference]
It is possible for more lore pets to be added, but they're at the bottom of the list now, they want to add other options to the other incarnate abilities first before adding even more to Lore.

There were some nice suggestions about randomizing things with the Trials. However, problems occur when you have a drastic difference in difficulty between certain components. I like the mention CoP there because Purple-mode is significantly harder than Red, and the complications there in.

Not to say that random components wouldn't work, they really can, it's just a difficult balance to make the variance interesting and not annoying. Especially since unlike some other raid-style encounters, we don't suffer from a lockout. It's alot easier to just decide to screw it and hope for an easier raid.

I do think 'hard modes' are a nice way to add some variance, but there needs to be a reasonable award for them, and personally, Astral Merits aren't worth it to me. And well, it's really just a delay of farm mode, since at least with BAF, it's not too hard to do a Mo run. Conversely, I don't see many Lambda master component runs going on either, it's just too frustrating of a difficulty hike.