Some post-release advice for ALL players.

I love the BAF! Each stage is easier to get the astral merits which speeds up the progression rate for people getting their powers.
At first i thought it was the more difficult of the two, but now i think its the best one to do. Sure it does need a few people to "lead" vocally but so far i think we've done it quite well and on Union we are getting quite a few players incarnated up with relative ease now

Best thing? Its only going to get easier!

QR: all this sounds about as fun as a trip to the dentist without Novocaine. Wheee.

I didn't have too much time last night, so got in one Lambda and one BAF. Succeeded at neither, but had a blast trying. And LEARNED a lot about how they work so I'll be ready for my next attempts tonight.

Also not surprised to see the usual whiners complaining about these. If you don't want to run them, don't. It's pretty simple.

I actually quite like that I can make progress regardless of success or failure at the trials. Good thread Nalrok.

I play to win, but I realize at this point the content is just too new. Don't get me wrong, winning feels wonderful when it happens! To realize that the group of people I'm with pulled together to do something that all of us barely know how to do, and succeeded, is great! However, most people didn't get onto Beta to try this, not even once, and are going into this without even the foggiest clue of what they're doing. As people gain experience, this -will- become easier. As people unlock their T1s, this -will- becoming easier. But, crying because we're not winning every single time at difficult tasks that aren't even 24 hours old yet just seems silly. It'll come. And when it does, it'll feel really, really good to succeed.

I've kind of been down this road before on other MMO's where raiding was just the expected thing; just look at any fantasy MMO and you'll know what I'm talking about. But it's a fundamental thing in any game design that players, when offered the choice, will take the path of least resistance. If you say the shiny is over there and you can go through a very difficult path and it has a learning curve and so on and you can experience this game content, OR you say you can do something less intensive and difficult, players will choose the second the majority of the time.

This isn't rocket science, this is known psychology. I'm not saying these Trials shouldn't exist, but the difference between this and other endgame scenarios are that you can take the rewards with you after you complete them. To have theoretical levels beyond 50 but they're unseen and in fact don't exist outside the Trials seems like counterproductive thinking to me. Revamp the Shadow Shard to be truly dangerous and requiring Incarnate powers to even go there, and I'll applaud you.

Give me Incarnate powers and then bottleneck me in such a way that the reward is significantly less than the risk and I'm going to question your judgement.


S.

I am a huge fan of the new trials, specifically the BAF. It is challenging but not cheap. A strong, vocal leader with a team who listens and responds can complete this trial with no problems. On the teams I led, I said from the get go that success is not guranteed, nor should it be expected. A failed run is NOT equivalant to a bad run. I ran 4 BAFS, 2 successful, 2 failed. Result? Judgment unlocked and slotted with tier 2

Only ran Lambda once and still learning the mechanics. It was a massive fail, but still fun and 20% toward unlocking interface.

Great advice from the OP.

Ran the Lamda last night w/no intention of succeeding, but knowing I'd be working towards my goals. Only 8 showed up, we cleared the outside including all turrets, went in and most of us had no idea what to do next. Very few grenades, etc were got, so we were flattened by Marauder. Multiple times. Still, we carried on til the timer ran out, eventually acid-mortaring all the doors at least. Failed the trial, but I got 32% XP towards my Interface slot and learned some good lessons for my next attempt. It'll only get easier.

See, from the discussion here, it sounds like there are basically two options:

1) I could take one of my poor little modestly-IO'd 50s on the trials right now, and very likely fail and die a lot. Maybe I'd eventually get enough knowledge and power before the frustration got to be too much.

2) I could wait until the playerbase has learned to handle these trials easily and then join a team, and very likely find myself trailing along behind a bunch of players who have done the trial a thousand times, while I try desperately to keep up. That way, I end up feeling like a leech while hoping that I won't be That One who screws things up for everyone.

Neither of those sounds fun in the slightest. So I'm going with option 3: ignore incarnate content and everything connected with it, while hoping it doesn't distort a game I enjoy.

It's a war...
You may lose some battles, but you can still win the war.

And yeah, a focused, step by step, careful/cohesive approach seems to be the order of the day.

Which, honestly, sounds like the approach to take to any and all content in this game when the deck is stacked against you.

As a soloist and small team runner, I'm pretty familiar with taking the approach of carefully doing what we need to and avoiding making mistakes... That's too many of them, we need to pull, retreat back to so-and-so spot, we can slowly whittle them away, avoid them, we can't just stand toe-to-toe with these guys... and so on.
I'm just hoping that these types of approaches (along with knowing how to use my different powers) is enough for this content.
Until I log in tonight... this is all just speculation on my part.

Back when I played WoW (back when the level cap was still only 60), the focus is all about raiding there. You get with 39 other people and lose for months on end. Sometimes you get a new hat or gloves for your effort, because you've been showing up and losing so often, you earned DKP.

So, I quit WoW and came here, because here, they don't do that nonsense.

Now you're saying that's the new goal? That is not a good thing.

This is a superhero game.

Superman: "That bank is being robbed. If I can make the robber drop some cash on his way out, that should be enough!"

X-Men: "Magneto's going to kill all humans. If we save a couple and he kills everyone else, that's fine."

It doesn't work.