Incarnates for non-elementalists?

I apologise for coming off as strong as I did. It's just a point I want to make as definitively as possible, because it's the cornerstone of why I got into City of Heroes to begin with, and why I'm still here - the ability to play characters who feel truly my own.

Over the years, I've relented and written my characters into the city's setting quite a bit more permanently, establishing lives, businesses, secret bases, ambitious plots and such. But even so, there's an absolute limit to how far I'm willing to stretch a concept, and redefining who and what a character is quite a fair way past that line.

When I play, say, Diablo, I don't really much care what my Barbarian's story is, what he's fighting for and where he comes from. He's a Barbarian, he kills things, and the extent of his personality that I care about is he can dual-wield two-handed weapons. But that's because the game forces me to choose one of five pre-made characters that I don't get much say in. Even something like Mass Effect isn't quite the same. I picked a male Shepard, but even so, he's Shepard. He has one of a select few pre-made backstories, he has his own personality and morality. He's Shepard. Whether Renegade Shepard or Paragon Shepard, he's still who he is, so I let him be who he is and fixate on the gameplay, instead.

The reason I've stayed in City of Heroes for this long is because I've been able to tell my stories with my characters, even if they exist in a pre-made world. Most of mine are removed from their original home, so they've had to learn to live in a City of Heroes. But they are still who they are, and they still do what they do. Over the years, I haven't stopped coming up with newer and newer stories. And every time I log one of my characters in, I keep thinking: "I can't believe I can actually play out my own story!" City of Heroes is the action figure I always wanted as a kid, because it's my imagination working to my rules.

I know that's not always true and I have indeed had to make quite a few concessions, but the fewer those are and the less extreme they are, the easier they are to swallow. Pretending black fire is a tangible force of destruction is a small price to pay for a cool cosmic horror. Rewriting my "is very tough" giant woman into having supernatural powers, by contrast, is too high a price to pay for performance.

So I look for excuses and explanations, and where such don't exist, I wait for new additions to enable them.

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.

Am I really the only one who read the Mender Ramiel story arc like the above-quoted language is what is, indeed, happening? (Which is why the "you summon a dead Praetorian from Well" seemed like such a jarring explanation of the Lore pets to me.) I must just be better at reading "elastically" than most players.

As with the other aspects of the endgame system, the real problem here is that the system is meant for people who love mechanics, not for people who love concepts. This is what so many people continue to fail to grasp. The endgame isn't meant for people who love the traditional strengths of CoH. It's meant for people who want the feeling of "beating" something and like the sensation of getting rewards. Put another way, it's meant for people to whom this is "a game" in the sense of "a game of chess" or "a game of football," not "a game of let's pretend." (Personally, I don't think we should be fostering that kind of attitude, but that isn't my decision to make. This is an MMO, not a book written by me.) Any satisfaction a "concept" player gets out of this system is secondary to the mechanical benefits, by design.

Not that that solves Sam's concept problems, but when has anything ever solved one of those?

Speaking of smilies, perhaps you should try what I suggested when Golden Girl made the same complaint, and recolor a circular effect bright yellow, to represent a gigantic smilie.

You're not, actually. That's how I read his original arc. And when all we knew of Incarnates was what was in the Alpha slot, it seemed plausible. After all, more enhancements just makes us better at what we do, because they enhance our existing powers.

But now that we're getting extra powers, the people who argue that we're borrowing powers and that we're all suddenly of the Magic origin have a lot more to back themselves up. After all, an Earth wielder has no Judgement option which could serve as an extension of his Earth powers, so he has to think sideways and find one which could be explained away as such, or otherwise just go with whatever has the best stats.

This is a problem with Epics as well, somewhat. When Scrappers got Fire for the first time, people wanted a Fire epic. We did get it, eventually, and I'm already using it on a few. However, when Scrappers got Electric powers, a corresponding Epic was not introduced. I'm still not sure what to do about that, to be honest. However, at least Scrappers still have access to Body Mastery, which is an easy out every time there isn't anything more appropriate available. I must have used Body/Energy for over half my Scrappers and Brutes, come to think of it.

Either way, I intend to interpret Incarnate powers are "my powers, only more strongerer"

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.

No apology necessary. My approach to your question was one sided, and you concisely explained your perspective.

Fighting Trolls or Outcasts isn't incredibly stupid. Making a deal with the devil is. I do not write my characters as incredibly stupid.

I don't think we should be fostering that kind of attitude either, because there is no need to. Up until now, you could have a highly effective character while remaining true to concept, unless your concept was something extreme like a petless Mastermind. Power customization served no purpose but to make it easier to build a character truer to concept and to allow Dark Armor users to see their costumes. Now we're taking a huge step back for no good reason.

On the plus side, Pyronic judgement does have an animation that looks a lot like throwing something. And it looks pretty freaking sweet. Incendiary grenades it is!

Yes, the incarnate system is designed to appeal to mechanics based players. The thing is if the story is not important why give it a story that is frustrating to players who either aren't into the mechanics or like a mix of mechanics and story?

The judegement, destiny and interface slots are pretty well designed from that point of view. It would have been nice to have a few alternate animations aimed at non-elemental characters but the basic concepts of the slots are generic enough to work for most characters. No matter what your origin you can generally figure out someway to make a large explosion from judgment and figure something from the destiny slot (interface is pretty minimal graphics wise so anything goes there).

With that in mind it would have been possible to write the story in a way that doesn't have the well overwriting your existing origin. For example they could do it so that Incarnate is simply a term applied to a super who has found a way to draw upon a source of power beyond themselves and transcended the power of a "normal" super. In that case the Well still exists and is a still a possible source of power for a Super (and indeed is still powering Tyrant) but it allows individual characters to decide what their "Incarnate Power Source" is.

For some characters it might remain "natural" in that they draw on their own power and really are just that good. Others might opt for a "divine" power source where they are drawing extra power from, essentially, their beliefs (whether an actual god, ancestor worship, nature worship or whatever). Some might take the "humans are awesome" route and say that they are drawing power from the city itself (I think AD&D had a prestige class based on this).

The point is that they could have made a generic story that allowed us to choose the source of our incarnate powers while still maintaining the Well as the "Big Bad" and most of the powers would have worked just fine. The Lore slot is the only one that doesn't really work that well with it and I think it's no surprise that it is the least popular of the new slots.

Where are you guys getting this "the Well is evil" stuff?

If any indication it seems to be that the Well is just lousy at picking a champion.

Handing a bunch of power to a guy hellbent on taking over the multiverse, killing all supers and enslaving everyone else isn't evil now?

You bought that line of malarky? Do you think a supreme evil entity would say, "Hey, I am evil. Stay away." No it wouldn't. I see what we are told and I don't buy it. I fully expect that once we are fully incarnated we will have to defeat a personification of The Well itself to prevent ourselves from becoming beholden to its influence.

You can, at the very least, concede that it is amoral.

I have never seen any character spout off the "being above good and evil" line and mean anything other than "I don't want to cop to being the bad guy, but I really really am."

My impression is that the Well actually figures that Cole has the best chance of stopping whatever other big thing that's coming, and that's why he's empowering him.

Ouroborous OTOH, thinks that's wrong: That Cole is weakness, not strength, and so seek to empower other individuals that might better defend the multiverse against The Coming Storm.

This is something that I honestly don't get. If story was as unimportant as it certainly feels it was, then why bother with such an in-depth, one-sided story? Why not just say we "overcame our limitations" and earned brand new powers, then let us figure out exactly WHY we suddenly have these powers by ourselves. Certainly those who don't care about story won't care about story and those of us who do care will come up with some reason of our own. Right now I have the Well doing its best to contradict me, and that gets in the way.

Personally, I'm not a fan of this "devil may care" attitude when it comes to story, lore and concept. I've been ragging on the game's writing for, ooh... Five, six years now? But I've only been outright pissed off at it for the past year, if that. We certainly seem to be ignoring good storytelling in favour of more game systems for people who like game systems for the sake of game systems. And while there's nothing wrong with that - I still play MineSweeper quite regularly - I keep expecting Paragon Studios to hold themselves in higher regard than just producers of playable schlock.

That's really not what I wanted to focus on, though, even though I was getting at it. We've had enough threads bashing the new Issue, even from my perspective. I was more looking to see if we can't come up with alternate reinterpretations of the current Incarnate powers so that they can fit into a broader range of existing characters without necessitating wholesale re-write, and to possibly narrow down what we might want to see if we wanted to broaden their scope with the biggest possible step.

Personally, my easy favourite so far has been reinterpreting Ion as Nanomachines, and I like that for a couple of reasons. First of all, there's no reason why Nanomachines can't deal energy damage, as one could see them manipulating objects on the atomic level via tractor beams or magnetism or electricity. Secondly, a stream of nannites could indeed act like a chain induction type power by attacking one enemy, then spreading to surrounding enemies like a disease. So that's both the graphics and the effects of the power explained, and then some.

I also like reinterpreting Void as psychic energy. I have a psychic character inspired partly from FEAR's Alma, partly from a story I wrote on request a few years before I played that game and partly based on a Naruto filler arc, whose whole shtick is that she's an immensely powerful psychic who accidentally sealed a demon of darkness inside her soul. As such, I can easily re-interpret all of her psychic powers as dealing Negative Energy damage. I'm not sure how appropriate this would be for more conventional psychics, but I'm sure that psychic energy can be changed into negative energy with enough pain and anger applied.

Those two already give me two ready answers for two characters I was uncertain about. And not just that, but it gives me a good idea of what I want to pick as said characters' epics.

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.

Like I said, the Well never actually said that.

Galactus.

This reminds me of something I wanted to add here:

When I say "I don't intend to bother for the next couple of years," this often comes off as an underhanded insult to the system, and it really isn't... For the most part. It's more me saying that the system as it is right now really doesn't seem to have much of what I want, so I'll wait for it to gain more options and do other things in the mean time. Well, for it to gain more options, or for me to get more ideas that work with it.

Though having seen the Pyronic Judgement, I have a hard time seeing it as a grenade, as it looks more like you're tossing fire, and it doesn't look like it blows up so much so that it just... Burns. And don't get me wrong, fire can be deadly, but it still takes some time to cook. I've had a gas oven explode in my face and singe the clothes on my body, and I ain't dead because the flash was too fast to give me more than a really bad case of sunburn And, yes, I'm serious here.

I'm actually a little stumped, to be honest. Other than just plain vanilla fire and "tangible force of destruction which looks and acts like fire," I have a hard time seeing Pyronic Judgement, or indeed fire powers in this game as anything other than... Well, fire of different colours. And fire CAN be a whole range of different colours in real life.

The Ice Judgement... I'm not so sure about. I haven't seen this one in person, but I have some doubt I could call it a hail of daggers. It does cold damage, doesn't it?

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.

Shouldn't we be rewriting (or most likely, constantly adding) to our characters' stories?

How exactly do you rationalize your swordsman being able to defeat god-like entities anyway? Perhaps it isn't the well so much *giving* you these powers as it is opening up a possible path that was not once there or concealed, and it's simply you taking advantage of it or educating one's self in said path since you'd need such power if you want to stand a chance.

While I can certainly agree that more animations for these types of powers would be great, your need for the effects to be so specific aren't really necessary. Why do you need lethal damage? What is 'void' or 'negative energy' anyway? 'Fire' can be many of things since there are so many ways to 'burn' things and so many different 'things' you could be burning. So your sword can cut through anything? What about vs an object that cannot be cut? Perhaps Sam must seek a new path in which to learn how to cut what cannot be cut?

Not necessarily. I don't have the habit of writing endless plodding epics about my characters. I tend to wrap their stories up in shorter one-off stories, and most of those I've written years ago. Just as a random example, my Tale of Two Hearts (which should still be somewhere in the RP forum) was wrapped up in 2007, and it defines two of my characters with great finality. I'm not interested in writing sequels for it, especially NOT editorially-driven sequels.

If Sam meets something which cannot be cut, then he will find a way to overcome this. If shooting it and punching it doesn't work, he will find some other way. Whatever that way may be, shooting fire out of his hands will not be it, because I'd sooner resign writing duties than do this to my namesake flagship character. This is not who and what he is, and it is not who and what I want him to be. Not when I can come up with far more interesting godlike powers for him... Which I've already done, as a point of fact. I came up with them before I even knew there would be Incarnates in the game. Indeed, before the game went up to level 50.

I can also assure you that the moment the game allows me to use Dual Pistols as a Scrapper epic, I will respec Sam on the spot and give him as many of those powers as I can. He has a crapton of unnecessary enhancement slots as it is.

I'm not asking for "Sam's Judgement." Far from it. I'm simply asking for a PHYSICAL judgement, i.e. a power which attacks with physical damage. Why is this so unthinkable? Not every character makes sense to have elemental powers. The Hulk doesn't have elemental powers, after all, and that doesn't stop him from punching buildings into bricks.

I want Incarnates to accommodate a broader spectrum of concepts so I can have more freedom to tell the story that I want to tell, rather than the story I HAVE to tell lest I give up entirely.

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.

Well, do these characters still go on adventures? You don't have to write it out, but that the character is not either dead or retired automatically means 'stuff' is being added to their 'background' unless they're constantly going back in time and un-writing past events.

...or are they all just dreaming? Or in a simulation? Oh, that'd be hackney

First off, and this is just my opinion, you're pigeon-holing elements way too bad. Or either simplifying what is 'physical'. My fire blaster uses 'physical' fire. It's not 'meta-physical' or 'spiritual' or 'religious' or 'extra-dimensional' fire, it's physical fire. Physical fire that burns physical things.

What is 'void' really but a state of 'nothing'? I'd sooner say, Sam being able to slice through anything must mean he can somehow displace matter or force things apart with something other than wedging two strongly bonded atoms apart when you consider the guys he's trying to cut. So 'void' would fit his description in that he simply inserts a 'void' between that guy's torso and legs.

Anyway, I'm not trying to be confrontational, although I sometimes come off as that. But, to me, you're complaining about you having a strict concept, not that the game will never support your concept.

I have stories written up for characters too, but I try to be flexible as well. Heck, I've 're-written' my main's story at least a dozen times and could foresee doing so again, not because I'm trying to accommodate for the game, but because I enjoy the character. It's not like writers don't tell different tales of existing comic heroes too, maybe with a twist that they're evil, or in an apocalyptic future or what have you.

An aside: My Kat/SR can cut through anything as well, even things not meant to be cut. When he started being able to cut through buses and tanks, he called his sword the 'Spirit Edge' but after he graduated to cutting through magical hexes, psionic locks, dimensional barriers and emotions themselves, it became the 'Abstract Edge'. He only ever was forced to the point of cutting what cannot be cut when faced with hardships that could not be overcome otherwise.

So, when Sam finds something he cannot cut, shoot or punch, what does he do? Does he seek help? Does he step back, try to understand things then come at it with a new understanding? Does he give up? Does he keep going until he's dead?

I could see my character doing any of the above, and in the context of the escalating story, seeking help might be the way to go. That said, I'll probably unlock the Judgement slot for him but won't bother filling it unless there are animations for weapons. It's not a problem, just another possibility. You're not penalized for not 'using' the Judgement power, and you still get a +lvl bonus. Instead, focus on the other incarnate powers that do make more sense.

Throwing knives.

Except for the ice shards sticking out of your forearms. Those are a dead giveaway.