Incarnates and Homogeneity

I really don't think there's anything more to be said about the subject than this. Anything else and I'll just be repeating the same things I said five years ago.

They didn't learn from Patron Pools. They didn't learn that people prefer powers that they have the choice of writing off as their own, or attributing to another entity as a granted power.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

All I will say about the Destiny slot is that I hope the persistent buff visual is subtle, or preferably non-existent. There's enough persistent glowy action-obscuring crap being thrown around already on teams without adding more. The activation visual should be noticeable but the buff effect shouldn't be. That said, I can easily treat it like Leadership. I'm not coordinating the team into a better defensive position, I'm not pointing out the targets' weak spots so you can do more damage, I'm running Maneuvers and Assault. I do sometimes RP Vengeance but that's because I played too much Diablo
The wording of things like "Notice of the Well" and "Favor of the Well" as well as requiring specific tasks to unlock the powers suggests they're being granted. Which is more grating than if you were just taking them. Sucking up to the boss for a raise isn't the same as legitimately earning that raise, or stating that you will quit if you don't get one.
You're not a "special snowflake" because that has become a derogatory term that implies a sense of entitlement. To this I respond: you are special. This game's much-lauded character creation system was designed to make you special. Your costume is purely aesthetic and the bio field is 1000 characters long to help you establish your specialness. You got weapon and power customization to make you even more special. You are not part of an undifferentiated mass. You are not part of the Incarnate herd. You are an Incarnate. It should make you feel even more special, not less.

Judgement should be fun. Some of my characters are perfectly suited to such powers, others would have to do a bit more justifying to fit them into their concepts. I have quite a few Natural origin characters, and for them such powers can't be handwaved away as coming from anything but an outside source. Ion and Void seem like the most conceptually flexible ones and will probably be my "well, if nothing else fits...." fallback choices. They're not ideal for everyone but they'll do. I'll probably use the fire one a lot simply because I seem to have quite a few characters with fire powers, and quite a few who don't have fire powers but whose backstories are linked to my main, who does. I won't have much use for Cryonic, conceptually.

Lore: Ugh. Just ugh. In terms of gameplay it'll fill any team I'm on with even more idiotic lag-causing whole-room aggroing pets. If they come with MM-style controls they'll just be idiotic and lag-causing. I honestly don't understand people's unconditional love of pets. I understand wanting a damaging pet if you're soloing a low-damage AT, or a pet to take the heat off you if you're squishy, and of course MMs need them, but tell me, why are your fat-*** spider pets that are blocking a doorway so your five teammates can't get in helping your team, and by extension you, in any way? How are those fire imps that just chased something across the map and aggrod three spawns that killed the Blaster who was contributing far more damage than they were useful?

I guess I already answered how I'll feel about everyone having Lore pets. Them being all the same means I won't immediately know who to complain about when one of them does something stupid.

Judgement: As a Blaster player, annihilating everything is my job. As a Brute player, keeping that Blaster safe so they can annihilate everything is part of my job. We already have a lot of players who feel annihilating everything is more important than any other role their chosen AT and powersets can play. Giving everybody the ability to annihilate everything will only encourage "soloing on teams" and further marginalize damage-focused ATs.

It also makes my 16-second recharge on Full Auto seem a little meh. What's the point in tweaking my build for massive, fast-recharging AoE damage when the Incarnate system lets everyone have it, and indeed assumes everyone will have it? Hey guys, I can do massive damage every spawn even though I'm squishy as hell....oh, never mind. Some Tanker already annihilated most of this spawn. And the soft-capped Defender is going to annihilate the next one.

I don't care what my fellow heroes and villains do. I see the game as my comic book title, with other heroes and villains existing in the world, but only becoming relevant to my title when we do a "crossover" and team up. I ignore their actions because the game requires it. I beat up Hro'Dtohz and saved the world. I can't have done that if I acknowledge that you did it too.

I strongly object to the idea that my powers aren't mine. I more strongly object to the ret-con that my powers were never mine. I even more strongly object to the idea that my powers come from something no one with a shred of sense would want to associate themselves with. Part of it is that I'm "chaotic alignment" in real life, and that carries over into my philosophy toward the game. I want my characters to be free, and beholden to no one, even the ones who are more inclined to respect law and order than freedom (although admittedly most of my characters who fit that description are "lawful evil" villains. My personal bias is showing.)

Tying yourself to an insane sentient entity is beyond idiotic, and playing unintelligent characters has never appealed to me. Some of them might be arrogant enough to make the proverbial deal with the devil believing they will come out on top, and some may be impulsive enough to stick their head in the crazy entity without bothering to find out what it's all about (yeah, I did Ramiel's arc, all they heard was "blah blah blah, Well, blah blah blah power, blah blah, beat up this guy, but watch out for blah blah...." and they were already off to beat up that guy) but the majority of them are savvy enough to avoid doing anything that stupid.

Yes, I do believe character diversity is an important part of the game. When there is only one way to do something, it's boring. When everyone is the same, it's boring. I have no investment in a generic drone, no matter how powerful they might be. I played WoW for three months and never gave a rat's patootie about my Blood Elf Rogue. I can't even remember his name. It was all about the next power, the next item upgrade, the next skill. That's part of why I only played for three months. I played this game for three weeks, saw how much easier a time many other powersets and ATs were having with stuff I struggled with, and never once thought of rerolling. I've never regretted choosing AR/Fire at character creation when I had no idea how the game worked and picked powersets that sounded cool.

Nobody looks like me, and nobody plays like me, and nobody looks or plays like anyone else. When I invite a Scrapper to my team, I don't know if they'll cut a bloody swath of destruction through everything in their path or hang back and protect the squishies. If I invite a Corruptor, I don't know if they will play predominatly as offense, or team support, or somewhere in the middle. Your Brute could be built for insane damage or insane survivability. It's awesome.

Making everyone more the same can only take away from that. I liked the Alpha slot because it gave you more flexibility in differentiating yourself, and building for your own playstyle. If you wanted to do more damage you could choose Musculature or Spiritual. If you wanted to be more survivable you could take Cardiac to run more toggles. Interface is also great for that (which has absolutely nothing to do with allowing lethal damage-reliant characters to have a -res proc, nope, nothing to see here, move along). Destiny too, to an extent, since I'm guessing many people will choose the buff that their own character finds most useful, and those that don't are also making a statement about how they want to treat their character. The AoE nature of the buff does diminish that a bit by giving everyone a team support role, but not as much as Judgement or Lore.

The Lore slot is especially problematic because it blatantly and unapologetically ties our characters to the storyline that is stripping us of our individuality. And that was a very long post.

I don't think that Judgement will be fast-recharging. I have nothing to back this up, but I get the feeling that the recharge will be long enough that people aren't going to use it every time that it's up out of concern that there will be a better time to use it in "just a minute". It doesn't help, though, that "Very long" recharge spans anywhere from three minutes to almost seventeen.

I'm starting to agree with this more and more. Incarnate stuff is becoming one of those things where I can see the underlying idea, I can understand how it might work, and yet I can't quite grasp the utterly rigid nature of the execution in a game that's otherwise so open.

Take Origin: Batman's Natural, but then so's Superman even though their powers are nothing alike. Everyone supplies their own backstory and interpretation of what the Origins actually mean.

Remember when Power Proliferation was first introduced and we got that extremely painful bit about how it was Dr. Brainstorm who was the one who did it? Notice how everybody pretends that never happened? Who honestly makes every Cold Defender or Battle Axe Brute with a Science Origin because their powers were created by "Dr. Brainstorm's Resonance Manipulator"? And yet according to game lore that's exactly what you're supposed to do.

And now with Incarnates it's like the Dev team is just screaming, "WELL OF FURIES!" at everyone.

Captain Awesome got his power when he was bitten by a - THE WELL DID IT!

Lady Cool uses her knowledge of technology to - WRONG! SHE USES THE WELL!

SuperDude was born with the amazing power of - NO, NO NO! WELL, WELL WELL!!!


Also, I'm sick of Marcus Cole being the cause of, and solution to, all of the Multiverse's problems. But that's a different rant.

Shield Charge has "Very Long" recharge. It's 90 seconds. So yeah, meaningless.

This is win.

Me too. As long as there were starting options that weren't Praetorian in addition to later unlocks. Even if it was just your generic Longbow/PPD/Vanguard/Arachnos pets, it would acknowledge that there was a game before Praetoria. If some other options were unlocked with existing badges (Rularuu, Council, Banished Pantheon, CoT, Carnies) it would give people even more starting options since you could collect the badges ahead of time. Unlockies based on Accomplishment badges would also make a great deal of sense for a slot called Lore.

I see no reason why this thing couldn't be reorganized so that the default Lore pet costumes (however many defaults the game would give us) represented a better mix of Praetorian and non-Praetorian options. Then from there we'd be free to gain/earn any other Lore pets costumes we wanted.

This idea, following the Halloween costume power model, potentially allows there to be literally dozens of Lore pet appearances to choose from that could be "assigned" to our Lore pets.

I do think diversity is good. But if you look at all the systems in the game, the amount of diversity is smaller than you might think -- many of the AT powersets are actually pretty similar, differing only in minor ways. There are only so many ways to hit and blow things up.

Take, for example, the epic power pools that you can get at 41. They are in fact rather limited and uniform. Each AT only has access to three or four different pools, and most of the powers in those pools are simply pulled from other powersets. The Patron power pools are the same way: most of them share powers and appearance.

What you have to consider is the overall amount of diversity for the entirety of the character, from costume options, to AT, to primary and secondary powersets, to epic set, to Alpha slots, and each of the other Incarnate powers.

There are going to be what, 11 different Incarnate slots? We would have a lack of diversity if every player made the same choice for each of those slots. But they won't. We may have only four choices for each of those slots, as we do with Epic Power Pools, but combinatorically speaking, even that small number will provide a very large number of combinations (4 to the 11th power).

But most people won't make random choices for their characters: they'll choose powers that are thematically consistent with their characters. I picked the Pyre epic power pool for my fire/fire tanker for the fire theme as much for the powers it contains. My ice/ice blaster has the cold epic because of the ice theme, even though Mace Mastery would work out numerically better.

Thematic choices for characters limit diversity as much as anything else, and those choices are made by players so their characters maintain an internal consistency.

Would I like there to be more options? Sure, but it's impossible for the devs to make that many different kinds of powers: they just don't have the time.

What I'd prefer to see, and what the devs have implemented partially with power customization, is the ability to customize the appearance and display effects of powers independent of their mechanics. In essence, I want to be able to make new power choices appear consistent with my basic AT powersets.

Some may disdainfully call that "homogeneity." Others call it "thematic consistency."

I like this idea


Lore is the only slot I don't care for, I'll still use it but it going to look odd with my Odin clone which is has magical/fantasy/medieval look to him running around with Robots or guys with guns, the Seers could work as being his Valkyries but they are so plain looking. I the costume idea Lothic had could fix this. also if they just redesgin the look of the seers give them robes they could pass as a magic pet

the rest of the slots look great to me and if they are opening 4 slots in issue 20 I can live with one being less then impressive, it just means it will be the last one i will craft for. As for everyone looking the same when it's over, I guess to some point that maybe true they could easily fix this by giving us a choice on what color we want the power to be so it blends with the rest of our powers.

Shadow Meld has a 90 second recharge time and is merely "Long"
Total Focus has a 20 second recharge time and is "Long"
Long Range Missile has a 240 second recharge time and is "Slow"
Power Burst has a 10 second recharge time and is "Slow"
Bone Smasher has a 14 second recharge time and is "Moderate"
Power Blast has an 8 second recharge time and is "Moderate"

Hate to burst your optimistic bubble, but read the i20 overview. It's linked. Yes, it is an indescribably awful idea.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tongue-in-cheek

I want to be clear that I meant no disdain in my post when I used that word. Some people like homogeneity. I also like it depending on the circumstances.

I've been reading all of the posts in here, and I don't think you're the voice of dissent. Several have expressed similar feelings.

Thanks for posting your feelings on the topic.

The way I tend to look at it is that the Incarnate system as a whole is a form of "leveling" as an Incarnate, but in a two-dimensional way we have never had before because leveling has always been fixed and linear in the past. The powers themselves are like a Tertiary Incarnate power set that we can unlock and use as we progress at being Incarnates. In a sense, Incarnates are like an inverted VEAT. VEATs all start like one of two things, and then eventually mature into one of four other VEAT subtypes, unlocking more powers in the process. They never fully abandon their roots, but they become more than that. Incarnates start off like one of twelve different initial archetypes, and eventually mature into Incarnates. They don't abandon their roots either, but they all eventually unlock the same additional set of options as Incarnates.

What do you think of that in terms of game design, and this game's design in particular? I remember you talking about mechanical homogeneity in the past. I'm curious about your thoughts as they relate to Incarnates, and the possible long-term results.

I'm not going to argue with you about it, I just want to know your thoughts.

On the subject of homogeneity. I worry about it, because I ultimately think its counter productive to the game as a whole. I'm not sure how to feel about the Incarnate system specifically yet, because it has both worrying signs of unnecessary homogeneity, but also enormous potential for diversity.

Where I'm worried: we have four choices for base Alpha. We have eight choices for uncommon alpha. We have *sixteen* choices for rare Alpha! We have, wait, eight choices for very rare? Why do the choices converge slightly at the end? They didn't have to: it would not have been hard to expand the system to make the very rares have thirty two possible combinatorial choices. That worries me, because it suggests more work than necessary to hand craft these things rather than using a system for generating them, and that simultaneously limits their diversity and also creates the potential for them to ironically become more cookie cutter than they need to be. And it suggests that the system may be harder to expand in the future.

Where I'm hopeful: there are lots of slots to go, and lots of opportunities to do incredibly interesting things. I can think of all sorts of ways to use those slots to amplify the diversity of the game in ways completely within the balance requirements of the system. I can think of all sorts of synergistic effects that could exist within the system itself. Think about future slots buffed in special or non-trivial ways by the Alpha you slot. You can't slot Incarnate powers with enhancements, but Alpha can buff them which provides some unique opportunities there. You could make a slot that ignores player buffs but obeys Alpha, so that your choice of Alpha determines the strengths of that future slot. Imagine a power that had a rainbow of buffs, but used the Hover trick: it buffs and debuffs the same stuff, but the buff is enhanceable and the debuff is not. So by default, the power doesn't to a lot, but Alpha could cause it to suddenly do a lot of something.

Imagine an Incarnate power that buffs Damage by +200% and -200%, with only the former being enhanceable. Activating it does nothing. So what? But if it obeyed Alpha, slotting a +33% damage Alpha would actually mean that power would now generate a net damage buff of 66%.

Suppose this power *also* buffed Defense by +100% and -100%. Slotting a +20% defense Alpha would mean this power would actually provide a +20% defense buff. So your choice of Alpha would affect what this power did. This is a highly simplified example just to illustrate the point.

Where the system can encourage diversity is to make choices meaningful. Each choice in the system should affect other choices, which should affect other choices. I don't see that happening in the system yet except in small ways, but I'm hoping the first few slots were laying the basic groundwork for more interesting behavior later. If each slot is just going to be a placeholder for one kind of power: self buff, pet, attack, etc, then its a huge waste of potential. If the system interacts with itself in a way that generates a rich set of behavior, then no matter how far we progress in it we won't all be the same. We'll have eight Incarnates on a team all different, because few people will make exactly the same choices ten times.

Honestly, I can see why Positron picked this gig. I would love to design Incarnate powers, but I doubt Matt's will let me anywhere near the system, because its just too much fun to share.

Where's the fun in that?