Massively: news about I20?

NDA could have been signed for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that they were testing I20 before I19 was even released.

Plus they mentioned new systems in I20, new incarnate powers, (Judgement is listed on the Incarnate Overview page in the GR site, I'm sure that's going to be in I20.)

And that's only what we know of so far...

Yeah, aren't players so dumb that they set themselves up for failure by making some of the stupidest and stupendously unrealistic conjectures based on not only flimsy information, but information that gets repeatedly debunked by real information?

It was pointed out by a big power point slide that the NDA for I120 was to test the new End Game Content, which is exactly what a 12-24 person Trial/TF sounds like.

People who made it out more than that were just brick brain dumb.

Yes, I know some conjectured for the fun of it, I'm talking about the ones who took the conjectures seriously and are now disappointed through their own fault.

Any disappointment here has to be laid fully and squarely on the fault of players and not one bit on the point of the Devs who said exactly what the signed-NDA was for.

This was posted and pointed out several times in the wild rear end conjecture threads:

Guessing its a smaller group of the same testers...nothing new there!

We saw most of this a while back when there was test server leak...nothing new!

...this is where I'm hoping something really special is happening that would require a signed NDA...or has the Marketing team come back for more?

Well hell, make it harder, then. 25 is a hard number for me to acquire. "Rare" means exactly that to me. I solo 98% of my play time, so I almost never get rare drops outside of special missions like the Halloween tip mission.

As I said, I've received 4 purple IOs since they were introduced. How much harder will it be for me to get Incarnate stuff? I've never farmed except one time where I got invited to a farming mission by accident. When I tried to actually play, I was booted off the team. I don't even know why.

You're using superjump to reach the sad-face conclusion

Probably true GG as i love using superjump...i'll just have to wait and see unless another guide to the obvious pops up before then

How much "rare" salvage has dropped for you? Because that's "rare".

Purples are not rare. They're classified as "super rare".

I can't even do everything in two years. I find it impossible to do TFs straight through. Look at the Screenshots forum where I've participated in a few of VexXxa's themed TFs -- I've gotten disconnected from every one of those at least once. Most TF teams aren't so tolerant of that and complete the thing before I can reboot and log back on. So, you know, major headache to do TFs. Rikti Ship and Hamidon raids, fuggedaboutit.

I'm not talking about SPEED. I'm more patient than anyone you've ever met, including you. But some things I just can't do, through no fault of my own. So all I'm saying is give those of us who can't participate in the primary way of achieving these goals a secondary way to achieve them. I don't care what it is, really. (Well, except merits. It took me more than a year to get enough merits to make a single roll for a rare recipe. I didn't get anything good but I sold it for 500,000, so that was okay, I guess. Not much of an incentive to keep joining GM teams and earn those 2 merits at a time, of course, so I figure that stuff is just pointless to do, but I tried it.)

So Incarnate stuff will be "super-duper rare"? I'm just saying, it's hard to come by, is all.

Based on the numbers in the GR Beta it sounded like Incarnate shards were quite a bit more common than purple. The statistic given in Zombies guide was that clearing a farm map set for x7 normally yielded 1 or 2 shards. So even if you run at lower difficulties you should get a shard every couple of missions.

This morning I logged in one of my several marketeers and was greeted with a cheery "80 items sold" notification. All 80 items were pieces of rare arcane salvage I'd picked up cheap during Halloween and listed last night.

Not to brag, just to point out that different players operate on different scales, and whatever system the devs go with is going to have to accommodate, for lack of a better phrase, 'power gamers'.

I'm hopeful they'll figure out a way to make the Incarnate stuff available to interested but not hyper-motivated players without trivializing it for the people who enter 'guided missile' mode the second a new goal is added to the game.

As I get the vast majority of my 'gear' via the market, and this stuff by all accounts won't be marketable, I find myself in the same boat as you. I don't have a lot of 'real' play time but I would like to dip a hoof into the Incarnate system...so hopefully it won't take either of us a million years to collect shards.

Put it this way; In the GR Beta, Shards were about between yellow and orange recipes. Obviously some luck is involved.

But anyone going 'OMFG, Shards are going to be Purple level rare!' can get cured of cranial-rectal reversal syndrome right now. Because the chances of that happening are non-existant.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I don't get this. At all.

You can earn 25 merits (1 random roll? or is it 20?) in a matter of hours, if not less, from doing solo story arcs. Even if you can only play 30 mins a day it should be doable in a week.

Also, in my experience playing solo doesn't earn you that many fewer drops than on a team. The drop rate per enemy is the same, and the drops get randomly devided over teammembers. So, more enemies, more drops, but also more people to divide the drops over. I'm tempted to say you'll actually get more drops while solo, even on +0x0. If you raise the number of enemies you'll definitely get more drops solo.

In my experience you do get lots more drops solo than when teaming, pretty much regardless of the spawn size you have set.

It's 20 merits for a random roll, so if you're doing any stories (other than Craptoria where the Merit Rewards are woeful) you can pretty quickly amass enough for a roll. You also get 50 the first time you do a Hero / Villain morality mission and re-enforce your morality, and an A-Merit which is worth 5 rolls after that (Rogues and Vigilantes get 50 merits instead each time they re-enforce I think?)

If you focus on running arcs and tips solo you can very quickly amass the things (my downfall is a combination of lack of focus on any one character and a love of the chaos and sheer randomness of PuGs. Even then I have a level 42 dual build Fort/Widow nicely Frankenslotted and with a nice wee collection of unique IOs I got from Random Rolls).

If I can overcome the crippling altisis and actually focus on a character for once getting some form of Incarnate Slot wouldn't take me long.

If it's really taking you THAT long I wouldn't even bother with Inventions, let alone purples and Incarnates.

Keep playing casually, it sounds like you are having fun.

Just pretend that the Incarnate system doesn't exist. You will save yourself a lot of unnecessary stress.

I guess you guys think I'm lying or something, but I've never had good luck with drops in this game. I never got a single costume recipe drop until *after* they changed the drop rate, so I missed out on all the nice 100 million Influence gains people had in the early days. As for buying a rare IO recipe, I recall it cost something like 175 merits or thereabouts, maybe even more. It's been a while so I don't recall exactly, but it was definitely in the triple digits. When you get a couple merits at a time, it takes a while to build up enough in order to afford a roll like that.

I played my 38 Dual Blades/Willpower Scrapper solo for about 3 hours (on and off) last night. Early in the evening I decided to buy a full set of Analyze Weakness (Def DeBuff) just because I felt like it. At first I didn't think I'd be able to get the special "Chance for +ToHit" because there didn't seem to be any for sale at any level, so I checked the merit vendor and the cost was 220 merits. No way THAT was going to happen. Fortunately someone decided to sell one at level 34 or 36 or something, so I snatched it up for a million+. (I had 9 million on hand.)

I did 5 tip missions, a FedEx, dropped a radio, did another radio, plus 3 or 4 regular missions from my contacts. Through all of that I got about 9 merits, what I consider a really good night, merit-wise. All told, I think I got about 11 SOs and 2 DOs. I got a few minor recipes. Jet Pack temp power, a Calibrated Accuracy, a Positron's Blast and a bunch of level 40 Common IOs (Defense Buff, Accuracy, Damage, Snare, etc.).

One interesting thing of note: After I bought all those Analyze Weakness, I either had a string of uncharacteristic good luck or they've reprogrammed the Salvage drops significantly to target what you need. I made a list of the salvage I didn't have, and was able to buy a few of them. I figured once I was done playing, I'd log on my 50 and email whichever ones she had, then have her buy the others since she can afford the 1 to 1.5 million some of them were going for. Surprisingly, I was actually getting a lot of the items the recipes needed. I've never noticed that happening before, but I've never, ever bought a full rack of the same kind of recipes before, either.

Here's the list. The ones with the red checkmarks are the drops I received.



And this has nothing to do with that, but I took this a couple minutes ago to show why I'm having a difficult time typing at the moment.

Like I said, I'm patient.

Craptoria, huh? The merits per-story might be small, but since they pile up every time you complete an arc of 4-5 missions, they add up.

My latest praetorian ran Resistance and came out with 187 merits at level 20. That's not crappy to me!

187 merits??? How on earth? It's 2 per arc isn't it??

I came out with a grand total of 20 or so. That was basically managing 2/3s of an arc in Imperial before I outlevelled and the entire zones worth of the 16-20 zone.

I did just one "strand" though, I didn't stop XP and run the other or anything.

See, 187 merits sounds fake to me, because I never get anything remotely like that. I don't really pay attention to merits, so I'd have to go look. If one of my guys has triple digits, I'd be stunned.

No, it's like 2 per contact, and there's like 3 contacts per level bracket. The brackets go 1-9, 10-14, 15-20, and I was doing both the Resistance threads, so I stopped my xp gain at 9, 14 and 20 until I'd gotten the morality mission that ends each arc. It took a little juggling and checking Paragonwiki to make sure the levels of the contacts I was playing so I wouldn't go past them.

Basically, that's the one thing I feel the devs really effed up about Praetoria - you outlevel contacts and they just stop giving you the next step, and you level way too fast in Praetoria. As it was, I have to solo there if I want any chance of looking at the storylines and getting badges/merits. That same character also got every single Praetorian badge, so I was enjoying taking my time in the zone.

Aside from that though, things are pretty much the same outside of Praetoria, and the only zone that gives you any kind of structured arc pre-20 is Faultline, and I don't even know how many merits that gives. I was super sad to bring that character out of Praetoria and find that Jim Temblor won't give you anything if you're over 19 so I had to skip that zone.

Yeah, by my reckoning you get 7 from running White + a storyline in Nova (as there is only 2 contacts in each here here but you get 4 for the second as they have 2 arcs), 8 for a full storyline in Imperial (4 contacts here) and 6 in Neuropolis for 21 in total.

Might go as far as 25 as the Wiki is incomplete but even allowing for that and doing all 4 storylines somehow you'd still only be at around 97 if you did absolutely every mission you can in Praetoria.

That was actually a typo on my part, it's 87 not 187. It's still not "crappy" to me though.

Also... I really don't know how you're having so much trouble getting merits. They're not based on luck. You just have to complete an arc, and they're all available via Oro. Paragonwiki has a whole list of them and how long they are and how many merits they give. I made myself a little list of every arc that gives more than 20 merits, so I can go bang those out when I need some.