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Originally Posted by AmazingMOO
Calling an Alpha Ability 'Very Rare' is like calling level 50 characters 'Very Rare'. |
Didn't the devs at one point say that the percentage of characters in the game at 50 was very small? That would make them pretty rare if still true. Just a small nit to pick.
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Surely you can just read it as being about how common it is for an Incarnate to have that level of ability? Its common for incarnates to have a one of the basic alpha slot ability but its very rare to find one that has one of the most powerful versions.
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Originally Posted by AmazingMOO
Calling an Alpha Ability 'Very Rare' is like calling level 50 characters 'Very Rare'. Not only is it incorrect, but it also belies the amount of work and effort a player has put into obtaining it. It's not something you just happen to get because the die roll came out in your favor. It's something that you worked for over a period of weeks. |
Always remember, we were Heroes.
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My personal percentage of level 50's is rather low. Somewhere around 10%. Then again, I have 14 level 50's out of 135ish characters total. Lately, due to time constraints, I only really play the level 50's on a regular basis. Due to this, it would appear to a casual observer that my level 50 percentage is close to 75%. But my level 50's are rare amongst my character roster. And of those, only one of them is anywhere close to getting the final alpha slot. My inv/ss tanker is 4 shards away from getting it. Once I do, that slot will be extremely rare for my characters to have; only 1 out of 135ish. Less than 1%; that's very rare in my book. Even when just looking at my level 50's, 1 out of 14 is 7%; so that's still pretty rare.|
Originally Posted by Antigonus
Didn't the devs at one point say that the percentage of characters in the game at 50 was very small? That would make them pretty rare if still true. Just a small nit to pick.
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It's not really that the slots are very rare in the sense that they're hard to find. It's that it's very rare to find a character with the slot (especially if we are talking about total character lists and are just picking at random to check if they have the very rare alpha slot).
@Johnstone & @Johnstone 2
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All my characters
It's a minor, pedantic gripe, but something that continually irritates me about the game is the terminology used. For example, we have a lot of power sets that use 'Build Up' and 'Aim'. Tanker, Scrapper, and Blaster powers are frequently balanced around these powers and the players all understand that they accomplish the same thing. However, they could be at least named differently, as shown by Focus Chi in MA, and Psychic Focus for Psi Blast and Concentration in Psi Manipulation.
The latest textual cheese grater to assault my nose is the naming scheme for the various Incarnate Alpha pieces. In various places, including parts of the Incarnate crafting window, pieces are called 'Common', 'Uncommon', 'Rare', and 'Very Rare'. A friend mentioned that this made more sense when the only place you could get certain pieces was taskforce drops. However, those descriptions don't really fit any more.
The real barrier for obtaining the Tier 4 Alpha Slot Abilities is not chance of having one drop on a taskforce. Rather it's time taken and effort spent to work towards the goal.
Calling an Alpha Ability 'Very Rare' is like calling level 50 characters 'Very Rare'. Not only is it incorrect, but it also belies the amount of work and effort a player has put into obtaining it. It's not something you just happen to get because the die roll came out in your favor. It's something that you worked for over a period of weeks.
There are a number of ways these could be referred that would be more appropriate and more descriptive. Some partial naming schemes even exist within the game itself. For example, the abilities' names contain 'Boost', 'Boost', 'Revamp', and 'Paragon', for tiers 1-4, respectively. If we were to differentiate between the two 'Boosts', it'd make a lot more sense than a 'Common' - 'Very Rare' spectrum.
T1 Alpha -- Alpha Boost
T2 Alpha -- Super Boost
T3 Alpha -- Revamp
T4 Alpha -- Paragon
'Super' is a tricky word to use when working in the comic book-themed genre due to the legal morass surrounding it. (Thanks a ton, DC and Marvel.) So some other theme might be better to use. Some friends and I were joking about using the term 'Epic', which is thrown around willy-nilly in MMOs, but the Tier 4 we settled on 'Super Epic', falls as dangerously close to the line as 'Super Boost'.
For the time being, I'll stick to the 'Tier 1' - 'Tier 4' spectrum. It's not as nice as it could be, but at least it's descriptive.