Obsoleted by Incarnate powers

Now that I've looked at the new Incarnate powers a bit, I'm worried about them obsoleting old powers and in some cases entire archetypes.

I'm not up on all the names just yet, but the best example might be the Destiny PBAoE aura that rezzes teammates. This essentially gives any AT the Resurrect power on a 2 minute timer, with a bonus AoE heal. Empaths and other ATs with ally rezzes might improve their builds by respeccing out of the rez powers and getting the Destiny rez. Rez as a powerset choice is obsolete.

There's also a Destiny aura that gives massive +resistance and +defense that slowly fades with time. By itself it doesn't *quite* make Sonic and Forcefield buffs obsolete. Doing some rough time trials, it seems to provide +90 resistance and +90% defense for 10 seconds, then about +30% for a minute, then +5% for another 30 seconds, with 30 seconds of downtime. It completely obsoletes *any* buffs for taking alpha strikes, but buffing characters have an advantage in that their buffs can be permanent (albeit that can take a lot of work).

But consider that *any* AT can have the Destiny aura, and you see how likely it is that three or more characters in a 24-character League will have it. With just a little coordination three incarnates can layer their Destiny buffs so that the longest-lasting part of the buffs becomes permanent. +30% to resistance and defense to an entire team or league, all with a single click -- that completely obsoletes even the most dedicated Sonic or FF bubbler. Buffing ATs may well be obsolete. Sonic defenders at least have some debuffs to fall back on, but FF defenders are well advised to respec out of *their entire primary powerset* once they achieve the Destiny incarnate powers.

It's not just Destiny. The Judgement powers are equivalent to blaster nukes, but with no crash and a much shorter recharge time. I cannot see the point of any level 50 taking or using a blaster nuke again.

The new incarnate powers obsolete individual powers from many support sets and all ranged blast sets, as well as a good fraction of all Defender archetypes. In my opinion this is poor design, and unhealthy for the high level game. At a minimum the incarnate power options should have been restricted by AT, to preserve the boundaries between offense, defense, and support that the rest of the game thrives on. Without those boundaries, a lot of game mechanics become obsolete relics that nobody will use. City of Incarnates is just not as interesting nor as diverse as what we had before.

tldr, but it sounds like character homogeneity.... Doom!

As someone with a Dark/ Def as their main, I have no issue with other players having an AoE Heal, Rez, +Resis and +Def.

In fact, that takes pressure off me to reserve my heal and rez, and not use them offensively like I enjoy doing.

"X does the same as Y" is more often than not a bad argument for not taking either option in this game. See superteams with buffs/debuffs stacking.

The ally rez in Destiny isn't on the heal, it's on the Barrier one.

Having just got my Uncommon Judgement, I can happily say, I'm not ditching my Nuke for anything.

I got it last night, and decided to run a couple of tip missions, with the idea that I'd use it as often as it recharged, jumping into the middle of a fresh spawn and firing it off.

Is it powerful? Yes.

Am I intending to use it lots? Yes.

Am I going to keep my slowly-getting-Purpled Nuke? Hell yes. It does more damage. Sure, it has a crash. But I tend to team with a friendly /Kin 'troller who's always ready to fill me up with Transference. And I tend to only use my Nuke on larger teams when the amount of damage it can dish out makes the end-crash worth it.

My Judgement power is going to be used a lot more, certainly, but my beautiful, beautiful Nuke still has a place.

As far as things like the Destiny slot is concerned - anything that'll let me survive more Alpha strikes can only be a good thing.

I suppose, though, at the end of the day, the question is: Does having X Incarnate ability make me feel more powerful than I did without it?

If the answer is "yes", then it's done the job. So far, I'm loving them.

while these buffs are nice and such, you have to remember that they can only apply while your toon is lvl 45+, as soon as you dip under 45 you lose all incarnate powers or if you are running with a toon that doesnt have the powers yet, or on a team that doesnt have the powers yet

the incarnate powers are very nice, but thats because the trials are very tough for teams who dont have a ton of experience with them and these help out a lot

yes any AT can get a destiny aura, but i would get something that benefitted my toon the most, the fact its an aoe its purely coincidental, most of my toons specifically are going with the ageless tree because of the +debuff resistance, which is something that almost no other power in the game gives (except to specific things like slow resist in the cold dom set and end drain resist in FF), the ageless tier 3 is giving us AV debuff resists (85% to all for about 45 sec), which i find much more useful than straight resist/defense since we have inspirations for those

tl/dr i do not see what the issue is here because there are 4 trees in each incarnate slot, and each of those trees have 9 possible incarnate powers which do slightly different things, so theres already a huge number of power differences

As Psy said, Destiny does not resurrect. Barrier does. Barrier is incredible. Don't worry about obsoletion; it's just something to stress you out. Play the game and enjoy.

EDIT: Your Judgement isn't affected by buffs. I've seen a Blaster fire off Inferno for well over 1.3k damage with Build Up and AIM; no other AT can do that.

Its not necessarily the current incarnate powers that pose a problem of causing a level of redundancy yet, but with the slated remaining powers to Omega we are reaching that saturation point.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone turn down a player that had the same abilities that someone else on the team already had. If one is good, two is better.

Similar abilities =/= same abilities. There are some things that resemble what certain ATs or powersets can do, but they're not the same in all aspects. Plus you need to consider that one of the reasons they're giving us these extra abilities is that we'll need them at some point down the road. Incarnate content will continue to get harder (hopefully) to match the growing abilities we gain.

No one is getting obsoleted unless they choose it willingly.

I've been on teams with judgement being thrown around, and you know what? We still would've done better in the damage department with a blaster. Judgement powers are very cool 'burst' abilities, but between the bursts things still need to be done, which is where powersets come in.

A team of 8 with a healing destiny power won't replace someone with a 6 second recharge heal. A team full of interface-flinging -regen won't match a -500% regen debuffing powerset. A team with a huge +defense power every 90 seconds can't cover the team as well as someone with constantly available everywhere, every time forcefields. A tank with a huge blast can't match the damage a blaster puts out.

In my experience, it just means that there's far less "wait, we need a 'X'!" And that's a welcome change. Yes, I know you never needed an empath, radiation emission character, stone tanker, etc- but now it makes the entry point for incarnates' teams to be far less formulaic. Characters enter the ring with all their normal strengths, and the team benefits from them. When The team comes into a situation the player usually couldn't cover, they now have an incarnate wildcard or two up their sleeve to play in the team's favor. I doubt most teams will disregard players on a wildcard basis.

I didn't think my original post was *that* long.

Okay for you tl;dr people, listen up --

It's not whether your incarnate powers help your character. It's whether you are made obsolete by the powers on the rest of your team. All ATs can now buff, rez, and nuke. Is that healthy for the game?

[QUOTE=RemusShepherd;3578371]I didn't think my original post was *that* long.

Okay for you tl;dr people, listen up --

It's not whether your incarnate powers help your character. It's whether you are made obsolete by the powers on the rest of your team. All ATs can now buff, rez, and nuke. Is that healthy for the game?[/QUOTE]

Emphatically YES! It takes the stress and pressure of my characters that specialize in those areas. My kins and empaths especially welcome it.

I will point out the buffs do only last for a short while at max strength, say 10 seconds, then they drop dramatically each ten second time slot after that (from 30% Res/Def to 15%, then to 10% then to 5%).

That doesn't replace a Force fielder with their 2 minute long huge def buffs or a Fire buffer who their large +res bonus on the same long timer.

The Destiny slots are more like MoG than actual buffs, their defensive build up style powers.

I don't currently have a 50 so I'm unsure of the answer but....

Don't you lose all your Incarnate abilities if you exemplar down below 45th level? If that's the case then respeccing out of so-called "obsolete" powers would leave you completely without them should you team with lower level characters.

What I'm worried about isn't those powers making ATs or powersets obsolete. But all this incarnate stuff is making the entire game obsolete. The game was TOO easy as is, and now with all this...it's just child's play. No challenge, not much fun in doing the content when every toon on the team is an artillery tank.