The Road To Incarnate

I've decided to start a journal chronicling my progress on Incarnate powers. Mostly to give myself *something* to do other than endlessly argue back and forth in some of the other threads here.

Day 1

Issue 20 launched! Logged in, did a little dance, converted 10 Shards into 10 Threads, and pressed the button to get into queue for the Incarnate Trials.

First trial: BAF. Someone reminds others to put League in my chat tab. Oh, good idea. Someone who's done this before is giving out instructions. I toss in some tidbits, like the towers and the consoles used to disable them.

There seem to be too many people hesitating, we don't go for AV pulls quite fast enough, and the reinforcements pile up on us. Can't manage to control both Siege and Nightstar, out of time.

Husband runs a BAF which fails on Siege (in a hilarious way, he says), and another that actually succeeds.

Second trial: BAF again. Someone asks which channel are people talking in. I advise them to add League to their chat tabs.

Goes a bit more smoothly, with a good leader and people willing to listen. At Siege + Nightstar phase, we're on top of the robot reinforcements, and manage to get Nightstar down to 5%, but when we turn to beat up Siege we find we don't quite have the punch to keep hammering him and keeping on top of the respawns.

We quit, but with a promise to rebuild the same league, possibly with some additional characters, and try again. But it's my bedtime, so I send a polite /tell and log off. My husband is already in the middle of another BAF.

Total gains: 56% Judgement slot on Silver Gale, 45 Incarnate Threads.

Around 5 AM, husband stumbles into bed, muttering about Judgement being awesome.

Day 2

Got distracted building a really awesome tower in Minecraft. Had time for one Lambda attempt. Hopelessly lost in the Munitions Depot. our half of the team split up and couldn't get anything done. Eventually by hitting stashes, we got enough Acids to shut down all the doors. There was a huge crowd around Marauder by then, and the rest of the Trial proceeded with people running in, grabbing all the attention, getting killed, repeat forever. Eventually when we were trying to regroup, someone drew Marauder out of the facility, trial failed.

Total gains: 25% Interface slot on Silver Gale. Up to 61 Threads.

What server are you on, Gale?

All my 50s are on Virtue.

Day 3

Husband stayed up all night playing BAFs and already has his Rare Lore with level-shift. When I get back from class, he's zonked out on the couch and CoH is down for patching. Converted 10 more Shards, got together with three SGmates and hit the queue.

BAF. The team is Defender/Controller heavy, with two brutes that will have to serve as pullers. One is fairly new to the whole concept. "I just got a message saying "Alpha Unlocked". What's Alpha?" He hesitates quite a bit when pulling, but eventually we down both robots. The double takedown stretches rather a long time - not quite enough AoE to take down the adds fast, and the AV meters seem to be crawling. But eventually we win.

My first Empyrean merit! A reward table! Quick, which Rare will I build first, what component is needed for it...?

Judgement Unlocked! Let's make a Cryonic Judgement. Recolored until it looks super-awesome. Converted Astral merits, saved the Empyrean one. Down to 29 Threads.

Day 4

Converted 10 Shards. Joined a BAF from the queue. It was going reasonably well until the final phase. Siege died, and the UI claimed Nightstar was at 0/100 even though she wasn't actually dead. Whether because of that or because too many people were dead or hosped at the time, we didn't take her down and Siege respawned.

Took a break, came back to run some Tips with my SGMates, then joined a small team of people I vaguely know and hopped into a BAF.

Oooh, it's my first power-tripping micro-managing raid leader! I wish I'd taken a picture. From the moment we pull Nightstar and he insists that we stand by the wall - no, *closer* to the wall - "EVERYBODY WHO IS NOT BY THE WALL HAS DOWN SYNDROME" (sic)... Then when someone else throws out a bit of info, he quickly shouts them down, because "its cofusing if two people lead". He seems to believe that since we clicked the button and were randomly assigned to this league, then we have "come to his raid" and must "do as he says". After some snarking and mockery of the concept, he starts kicking people.

It's the final phase of the BAF, it's going well, and my first instinct is to keep quiet and get my iXP, but you know what? Forget that. Jerks should not be tolerated. If we win it's all going to be thanks to his brilliant leadership, if we lose it'll all be the fault of us not following his orders. It may cost me some progress, but that's how it is sometimes.

So I type in a line in chat letting the jerk know he is one-starred and I hope that means I won't see him again, send it, and immediately quit the team.

I see out team already outside, having either been kicked or left. We reform, adding some new people (including someone completely new to Trials!) and hit the BAF again.

Same story as many of my attempts. Doing good at first, not quite get Nightstar and Siege down simultaneously, Siege respawns, massive continous death by 9CU follows.

Still, I'm up to 52% on Lore unlock. And quite a lot of Threads. It's not so bad.

I'm kind of hungry at this point, but my husband looks at our Global channel and says "you know what we have? Eight people. That's a Lambda team."

Turns out some of us are busy, so a team of six signs up for the Lambda Sector queue.

Blazing Angel Akiko, Fire/Stone Tank, my husband's main (she was getting posessed by divine powers before it was cool)

Miskinetic, Kin/SR Brute, a native of Praetoria

Echo Null, Ill/Rad Controller, a 10-yeah-old future psychic megalomaniac

Sweet Melody, Mind/FF controller, also has tangled with divine powers before

Broken Hex, Warshade

and Silver Gale, your own Storm/Elec Defender.

As the loading screen falls away, we see we've gained a Fortunata, an Elec/? Scrapper on Team 3, and a Tank who is currently the League Leader and the only person in Team 1.

The Tank moves the Scrapper to our team, and when we try to explain that he should even things out a little, he soon quits.

So Akiko, seasoned veteran of raid leading, takes the raid lead. Our resulting 8-man team of Tank, Brute, Scrapper, Fort, Warshade, two Controllers and Defender sweeps out the courtyard and surrounding streets, then takes down the AA guns. Brute and Scrapper each crash a few times.

We go in, split up into two 4-man teams, and on the word "go!" we go glowy hunting. A few minutes in, the 30-minute downtime warning pops up. The Scrapper vanishes and isn't seen again, along with the two Molecular Acids and one Pacification Grenade they were carrying.

The lab team grabs 10 Acids handily (getting the Synchronised badge at one point through sheer luck), then comes back to help us with the Grenades. every time we get one, it extends the timer, making this part frentic but not undoable.

Eventually we have 10 of each temp power, three Astral merits plus the one from the badge, and Marauder appears. We shut down the doors we can, then grab additional Acids from a stash, and finally they are all sealed. We discuss our strategy for Grenade launching, and then on the word "go" we charge in.

At first it goes well, we focus on the Praetorian troops while Aki keeps Marauder busy. We call grenades, launch them one by one, and start beating him down. Slowly, but surely, we're winning.

Then he starts hopping around, which takes a few of us by surprise. Ten-minute warning until server downtime. And then we run out of grenades.

So we have to grab the weapons cache, have the person who got the grenade fling it at Marauder as fast as they can, and beat him down. One weapons cache. A second. We're making frequent trips back from the hospital now, the timer is ticking both on the Trial and the looming server downtime, and Marauder is hovering around 5% and won't go down further.

Third weapons cache. Grenade pops up in my bar - but I'm in the hospital and the door is 10 seconds from opening. Fortunately I don't have to pause to type that, I can just tell it to my husband sitting next to me, who notifies the team as I'm clicking on the door.

Gale swoops in from the sky and tosses one last grenade down at Marauder. The team focuses all their fire, and with about 10 seconds left on the timer, he goes down.

My husband flips out. Mostly in chat text, granted.

By the time the adrenaline fades I'm so tired I can barely manage to eat a few chips (British chips, which are like thick fries, hot form the oven) before I fall right asleep.

And that was last night. Lore: 52%, Interface: 76%. 124 Incarnate Threads, 2 Emp Merits.

Echo Null's player here. I thought I'd bring up two minor corrections to the account as presented:

1. Echo is 12 years old, not 10.

2. While the rest of the team was cracking weapon caches for extra pacification grenades, Echo was left tanking Marauder with a stream of Phantom Armies and Decoy Phantasms.

Not raiding nearly as hard as Gale or Pyro, but I'll get my Judgement yet!

Day 5&6

Got invited to a few trials by a guy very good at leading them. Won a BAF, and a Lambda, for a total of 4 Empyrean Merits. Upgraded Judgement to Uncommon. Unlocked Interface, created a Common Gravitic.

Day 7

Ran an ITF, third this week, for badge progress. I think I quite like Freezing Rain + Gravitic Interface + Cryonic Judgement. Just before the final Nictus!Romulus battle, a teammate hit us with a Rare Barrier buff. Rommy died twice by the time it wore off.

Distracted from further play by a malware infection on my computer that took all night to clean.