rsclark

Pretty much this. I'll buy pretty much any power if it's permanent. I bought the self destruct power which I have never used except as a test to see what it looked like. But no way am I paying for expendables.

Gathering enemies in one place is considered enough of an advantage to require the ambush nerf.

And if you kill a Hellion on the street you will outlevel it. That doesn't happen in a trial - see CEBR for the effects of constantly killing very low level enemies.

I could also turn off all my toggles and stand there waiting to die, all the while cheering about my awesome new flexibility.

Having flexible strategies is good. Having a strategy that is strictly inferior to almost all others is nothing but an indication of a poor strategy. Even after hundreds of years, no one has developed that awesome chess opening strategy that consists of nothing but single advancing pawns for the first 30 moves - and that's still a more sensible strategy than knocking a group outside of the AoE damage and outside of the taunt auras and outside of the debuff radius and outside of the aoe control effects.

No, you really can't. At absolute best, they are up for 90 seconds and down for 10, and that's with an army of kins keeping you at the hardcap on recharge. For a realistic purpled out character, those are up a little over 50% of the time - far from perma.

And for the vast majority of non-level shifted, non-IOed, PUG masses actually need 16 or 24.

And none of it is for incarnates.

People keep being intentionally sloppy with their use of language. They keep using "non-raid" and "non-incarnate" as if they mean the same thing when they do not.

That's like commenting on the variety ina pig's diet, because when you slopped him today, there were more corncobs in the bucket.

The team composition of trials doesn't provide variety, it provides a colorless mush.

A 2-3 man group might provide variety, but not 20 people. Any variation gets eaten by the chaos.

I do not have a single level 2 that can run at +4/X8, but many level 50s who can. Other than a slight dip in the teens for some characters, you consistently fight not only harder, but larger numbers of enemies the further you go in this game.

You just described every other MMO I have played, but not this one at all.

Yea, while I'm thrilled that people like the new pieces they offer, they (almost universally) seem busy and overly elaborate for my tastes. I can't help but think a lot of heroes must sound like a bag of loose coins wrapped in sleigh bells walking down the street.

No wall in the game is solid. No character in the game is solid. They are all just numbers. And if one of them gets a tiny fraction off from where it should be, you're looking at the wrong side of a wall.

The most annoying place I've seen it recently is in the villain SSA. In the vault, you need to kill two groups and click a glowie to end the mission. Twice, I have had one of the two groups run, leap onto a lighting fixture and hop above the ceiling.

And you are treating this like it is just 1 or 2 new things. It isn't. This is the entire theory behind the endgame. The decision to make many, mutually exclusive powers cannot help but make duplicate, repetitive content.

The problem is convenience.

I can get together a half dozen of my friends and play a real RPG and have 10 times the fun I have ever or will ever have in this game.

What I can't do is all that in the half hour I have before I need to go to work on a Wednesday morning. MMOs provide a compromise. Convenience in exchange for the experience not being perfectly customized to what I would like.

Gating the content behind getting 2 dozen people ready removes the convenience without giving anything in return.

Did you bother to even read the post I responded to, or did you simply reply to my post as if it were in a vacuum?
Just for your convenience, here is the post I responded to...
So, no, I didn't say that I do content I don't like. I will never get any of these new powers on any character that already has one. (note the subtle difference between grinding for a first incarnate power and grinding for a replacement one) All, I said I expected the developers to produce content I do like in exchange for my money. And then I explained why the content they did make (in this case the new incarnate trees) does not fulfill that requirement.

Clear now?

You are silly and willfully misreading me if you for even a second thought I was talking about anything other than the way we are treated by the game. It's dumb to even jump to that obvious strawman.

Could not disagree more with this. Whenever I am in charge of one of the teams in lam, I always announce that we will clear the group around the objectives before moving on and clear any that are in our way.

In every single instance of that, the other group has come to our aid and helped us finish - often being done before we hit 5. If they are running slow, I have no choice but to abandon my plan and let people run rampant. Better a few dead squishies than a lost astral for everyone and a chance at failing the trial.

In every instance I have tried it, 3 running maniacs who can solo a crate are far superior to a group sticking together and killing things. Maybe a group of +3s can kill everything effectively, but why would they bother?

And that problem falls squarely in the laps of those that designed the trial, not the players.

No, that's not ideal in any way.

As crappy as the system is currently, there is a twisted logic to it. You try for the payoff of getting a very rare at the end of the trial, but if you don't, you still get the merit and make some progress along the slow and steady path. It's a net to prevent people from falling too far behind due to bad luck.

This takes away the safety net - and likely long before it has produced enough merits to actually buy something useful. Now instead of the chance at something good and the guarantee of a consolation prize, you instead have a forced gamble. It's the Lottery way of thinking!! Throw your time and effort away and flush til your heart's content. You might just hit the jackpot.

That might be true if UG didn't quickly give you the XP to unlock pretty much everything long before you can slot anything. I have a character who ran it a couple of times who is half done with both destiny and lore, but not even close to slotting anything but Alpha. Unless you follow a particular path in what order you run trials, it is not in any way guaranteed that you will be significantly more powerful when you run the other two than when you run BAF and LAM. If the intent is to make it graded in difficulty, then they should state that somewhere so we don't inadvertently gimp ourselves with no easy way to close the gap.

Don't bring the truth into this discussion.

The main problem I have with the emp changes is that it pushes you to not only run trials, but to run them in a particular order.

Run a UG before you complete opening the slots, and you effectively cheat yourself out of rewards in the long run.

The only sensible path is to farm baf and lam early so you already have all the components you need before you start the other two. Anything else results in needing to run more trials to earn the same rewards.

I made the mistake of running my MM through UG because it was available, and now I'm starting to consider that it would be more efficient to delete and re-level to 50 and do the trials in the "correct" order. Even if I eventually decide it's better to stick with the character now, it's still not something that should ever be close enough to be worth considering.

Freedom - run what we tell you to and when we tell you to.

Well, technically, it says it makes it bound to your account. So, really, the inability to mail it to yourself should be considered a bug.

I would like to know in what way the emp merit change can be seen as an encouragement. It takes something that people want and removes it while replacing it with nothing. All my college psychology may be a bit rusty, but I don't recall any discussion of encouragement that included removal of rewards.

Come up with some better word than "punishment" if you like, because I don't particularly think that one fits either, but "encouragement" is the totally wrong word.