Great, the incarnate system requires completing a mission arc

And this sums it up in a nutshell folks. Some people, like UberGuy and Golden Girl, don't think others should have multiple options simply because they like it as is.

People wanting more ways to unlock incarnates are taking absolutely nothing from them. But they don't want us to have options just because it doesn't fit into their idea of how we should play.

It can also be completed in about 10 minutes

We have how many slots left to unlock? We may very well be seeing TD again before it is over (if we didn't kill him).

Please no...I don't want to see photo shopped Statesmen or Posi as the Terminator.

Not just him.. but all of them. The ticks of damage from the temporary god mode powers were the same no matter what the power I used so Brawl was pretty much just as fast as anything else. And entertaining as hell.

There are nine more Incarnate Slots left to unlock (one of the rednames had badges for the following):

Alpha, Judgement, Interface, Lore, Destiny, Hybrid, Genesis, Mind, Vitae, and Omega.

As to seeing Trapdoor again, all I can say is "Big whoop."

The Well puts it this way: "I must say, I'm disappointed that you chose not to finish him off. He will come back to hunt you down, even if he is saved."

So we either get a NPC with no other purpose or he survives you "killing" him in an even more contrived way. Either way he'll "hunt you down". Can the story get more contrived? Apparently it can. They are already planning on negating a player's choice to kill him in yet another clichéd way. I can see it now: "Oh you just thought you killed me, but I split myself in the last moment and got away". Even worse, it just reinforces my statement that the player's choice to spare or kill Trap Door is a Faustian Choice. No matter what the player chooses, they get the same NPC "hunting" them at a later point.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

I aggroed as many as I could and dropped Freezing Rain on them. I bet Caltrops would rip them up too.

I actually liked this mission. It does get a bit gimmicky on repeats, but it was an interesting diversion.

Agreed. As one who actually enjoys solo and light-group content, it felt nice to having to run a miniature TF just to unlock it. Almost soloed the thing if it weren't for Heroone being so OPed :P But all in all, I feel content with having to do a mission to unlock it rather than "Hey you got a badge for logging in! Congratulations!"

Well, we've already had plenty of time travel and killer robots in I19 - so they might decide to go for something else :P

HAHAHA... so true.

seriously, i know everyone on the boards is focused on what it will do for their uber/IOed-out builds, but i hope its not lost that the alpha slot will help non-IOed characters way more than IOed characters due to ED. adding that extra SOs worth of damage or end redux or recharge could significantly change the effectiveness of a SO build, and its a nice alternative to spending the immense time/effort/inf it takes to IO out a build.

Contrived plots and improbable returns of defeated characters, in a game based on comic books? The devil you say!

That is funny, as absolutely no one is suggesting that.

In fact people are suggesting that you should be able to choose to do a longer series of missions (ITF, LGTF, STF, RSF, Khan, Cuda) or another task (CoP, Hami Raid) that is actually harder to unlock the slot.

Way to misrepresent what people are saying.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Wow, a guy who can make clones of himself survived being killed? How could that happen? It's like there's two of him.

There is a reason why some comic books don't do well.

Stories that are predictable aren't really stories (or at least not good stories). Stories should, if properly crafted, make the reader (or player) want more information. The arc fails on this point.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

I would've sworn Apex and Tin Mage weren't even available if your Alpha wasn't unlocked. The debuff just fills the Alpha slot if there's nothing else there...

That's not a Faustian Choice, that's a Morton's Fork; "two unpleasant seeming alternatives that ultimately lead to the same unpleasant conclusion".

The choice of whether to take the fast or slow path to Incarnate-hood would be a classical Faustian Choice if it was actually presented to you; a situation where you take the "fast, easy" dark-side route despite the knowledge that it will eventually doom you. However, what you *actually* get is a Hobson's Choice, where your choice is the slow path or nothing.

:: Pauses, looks at historically top-selling comic book titles:
- X-Men (any, multiple titles)
- Superman (any, multiple titles)
- Spider Man (any, multiple titles)
- Avengers (any, multiple titles)
- Batman (any, multiple titles)
- Fantastic Four
- Hulk
- Thor
- Wonder Woman

:: Realizes that probably 3/4 of all the comics for all those titles are nothing BUT contrived plots with improbable returns of defeated characters.
:: /em lightbulb




So... you're saying that to BE a successful comic, you need BOTH?


::Starts re-writing several dozen scripts.



...Damn, knew I was missing something....

Concerns about the current situation and how much further it will go are exactly my primary worry.

One of the primary reasons my friends and I stay with or keep coming back to CoH, as opposed to other MMORPGs, is specifically that there is a minimum of level-gated content. The fact that due to the exemplar system and the rarity of explicitly-gated content, we don't have to worry too much about who is ahead of whom on which character on which server is one of the *primary draws* for CoH, and why we're not playing those other MMORPGs.

In particular, amongst my friends there are substantial differences in playtime both in a vet reward sort of way, and in an available hours per week sort of way. We've got people who have been around since the beginning and people with less than a year. We've got people who are currently unemployed and can play 10 hours a day if they wanted, and people with family, careers, volunteer work, and other demands so that they're lucky to see four hours a week. We've even got one person who only got their own account recently, but doesn't have access to a computer capable of playing CoH except when they visit one of the others of us on vacation; their play time per quarter might not hit what some people can do in a day. Yet CoH is AFAIK the world leader at allowing people who literally have two orders of magnitude differences in time played to enjoy productively teaming together.

If this were "real" levels to 60, the current excellent exemplar system would hopefully continue to work; a level 60, a 56, and a 45 could team up with few problems. Yet they're deliberately throwing out one of the reasons we choose CoH over the competition by locking people out of playing with their friends in what could well be an increasingly byzantine gating system. Consider how much gating we've had with only half of a slot, and we've got at least another 19 halves to go. I seriously hope this doesn't happen, but the trend they've established at the moment is "If you're not completely unlocked and slotted to the current standard, we will add a new arbitrary and extremely punitive mechanic keeping you from being relevant."

Our experience with complex gating systems in other MMORPGs is that they are ultimately highly divisive; they create frustration both in players ahead who have to repeat earlier progress, wait for friends, or forge onward with rapidly decreasing support, and in players who are behind who have to keep begging people to re-do things, or find that they log on and aren't qualified to participate in any of the things that their friends are doing. Yes, there are plenty of other MMORPGs where that's the norm; again, the reason we're here and not there is that it's not what we want.

The game does track choices now. One of the unlocks could have a fork, if you killed TD you have to do one mission if you didn't you have to do another.

My personal take is that the best option is to have an *alternate* unlock be available with a non-trivial number of Alignment Merits. The tech to have it cost merits is already developed and partially tested. The in-canon logic that by repeatedly demonstrating the values that you exemplify, you eventually start to become regarded as an avatar of those values and being able to draw on higher sources of power is reasonably sound. The mechanical time-based limitations on earning AMs allows the devs to put a hard lower bound on the speed at which people can earn them. And from a metagame standpoint, it was strongly suggested that staying true to your original alignment over a long period would have meaningful rewards to balance the obvious short-term draws of Going Rogue, and that's currently not really the case.