I have run 10 trials today, I never want to run them again. Am I alone?

I'm loving the trials and the grind, because that's what I find enjoyable in MMOs -- a lot of work for a good payoff. CoH never kept my interest for more than a couple of months out of each year due to the lack of any true endgame, now I'm truly enjoying this game for the longterm for the first time.

I am bored of the BAF already, after two failures, one crash-out and two successes. I have seen how little of a contribution I actually need to make in order to succeed, and have no interest in doing it again. Lambda, I haven't actually finished yet, although I came very very close with only seven people, so I'm convinced it can be done with eight in which case everyone's contribution would be crucial. That interests me more. Not enough to do it every day mind, and I don't see my squishies contributing much from their position as Munitions Warehouse Floor Inspector, but I figure at one Lambda a week, I should have Interface and Destiny unlocked on at least a few characters by...September maybe? Just in time to get the new grind for the next slots? This is assuming I can find people to run with who haven't gotten everything unlocked yet and don't just want to rush through for their empyrean merit, since at some point I'd like to get the shinies on something that isn't a Scrapper or Brute and can't just run into the next mob and hope other people follow.

I'm putting up with it for now. 3 Evenings and 1 morning of play later and I have my Very Rare Judgement and Interface and Rare Lore and Destiny on my main Tanker.

I am hoping the other 2 trials currently under development are out soon in the form of I20.5, if anything just to offer a bit of variety in doing trial runs.

Once the Tanker is done I am moving onto my Corrupter as I really, really, REALLY want Ion Judgement on that toon. But likely to be running regular content just to finish off the IO build first before going back the trials, therefore having a break from them.

Okay.

I'm still having a blast with the trials. Haven't failed a BAF yet, and finally completed Lambda Saturday. The cutscenes are getting annoying, but overall I'm still enjoying it.

I guess your mileage may vary and such. Then again, I'm not running 10 of them in one day either. I think the most I did was 3 in a day.

I like the trials. I just hate having to repeat the same content over and over and over like that. So what I do is run a couple trials a day, and just spend the rest of the day doing something else. Actually I've gone back to really enjoying playing my lowbie toons lately. I've actually respec'd a bunch of toons that I've been meaning to do so for months now (into I19 builds..lol). I have a new scrapper that only hit 50 a few days ago that I'm working the Alpha boost for, too. So, I'm just pretty treating the trials like any other TF. Run it occasionally (well..a little bit more than occasionally I suppose) while still enjoying the rest of the content.

There are two problems as I see it:

There are 2 trials that need to be repeated and the specific issues are

They aren't very good. They aren't very long.

Thus the content doesn't capture the imagination, and then it's all over and an interminable rinse and repeat.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

i think the op is saying he wants other options to earning ixp. so do i. i think a great thing would be to open up the shadow shard as incarnate spot and open it up to villians. that way people can do mission or whatever to earn ixp and its componets.

Test rat - ignore the new trials.

Seriously, I will not be doing them because all they did was instead of remembering who their customers are and what we do in our game - they made a farmers paradise.


I have said it before and this is my last time of saying it - make all the Incarnate currency SHARDS. The narrow path to unlocking 3 of the 4 slots is a joke. For the Alpha - I have a weekly TF, I have normal missions and I have a Gate to pass.

The BAF and Lambda should have been a GATE - not a farm. I seriously consider the Devs to have made an epic blunder and trying to jam a Raid style down our throat will cause players to leave.

Here's something to remember on the subject of "grind:"

The 1-50 game may take a while for most people, but it has seven years of content behind it. This makes it a very BAD measuring stick for future game extensions, because those extensions come WITHOUT seven years of content behind them. To make the Incarnate system even attempt to reach the length of the 1-50 game is a capital mistake, because it does so not on the content of ~18 Issues, but rather on two Trials. There's no going around that point - the Incarnate system does not have enough content to take as long as it does, and ESPECIALLY as long as it's proposed to take.

Years ago, Jack Emmert explained that when he and Matt Miller sat down to devise the 40-50 game, they intended for it to take as long as the 1-40 game. I know Jack considers this a mistake, and Matt must consider it such by evidence of Experience Scaling. The result of making the 40-50 game into a time sink was long, boring, repetitive stretched content in the face of To Save a Thousand Worlds, To Save a Soul, A Hero's Hero and other arcs which consist of 90% padding. The result was also mammoths of excess like World Wide Red and Division: Line, which despite being good arcs at heart are still padded out the gills.

It resulted in the inclusion of the Shadow Shard, a zone that was as close to cutting corners as we've come before the Incarnate system. The Shadow Shard had practically ZERO content, and was instead intended to let people make their own fun by essentially farming Soldiers of Rularuu spawns. The only meaningful content there was a quartet of 8-hour TFs, obviously designed to waste our time and keep ups playing longer. And we've seen how popular those ended up being.

Even the 1-40 game didn't have enough content to ferry us all the way through until something like I12 with Experience Scaling, because you'd run out of missions at level 38 and Numina's TF was bracketed at 35-38, in a time before the existence of exemplaring and, more importantly, in a time when exemplaring did not grant experience. And even the 40-50 game didn't have enough content at its time of introduction. The Grandville story contacts could only ever carry me up to level 44, before I had to grind Paper missions for a full 8-hour day to get to level 45.

Giving us enough content to get from level 1 to level 50 was not done in one or two Issues, and it was not done in any one expansion. It was a long, laborious process of adding still more and more content, plugging up holes, adding alternate paths, expanding existing stories and enriching the experience (not XP, "experience"). Are we seriously proposing that we can just up and add a system which doubles that playtime within its own confines? Like... Overnight? Replicating a playtime which took YEARS to provide for overnight? Because I don't think that can work.

Yes, people are bored of the grind already. Some faster than others. And you really shouldn't blame them, because what we have to work of for this system which is already being said to take as long as getting from 1 to 50 is, ostensibly, half an Issue's worth of content. If not a quarter of an Issue's worth, depending on whether they choose to run an Issue 20.5.

I don't want to take anything away from those who like running and rerunning the Incarnate Trials. More power to you guys! But we have to stop kidding ourselves that there isn't a stark lack of Incarnate content, or that anything but a serious, concentrate effort can fix that. There's only so long that rewards without content can last.

Quote:

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.

Hmm, see, I'm of a mixed view on this.

I like the new trials (well, Lambda, not done BAF yet) event though never actually finished it (last night my router died just before Marauder dropped, hows that for crappy timing! ) and it's fun, but I'm only about 60% done for the slot, and got 2 parts of the first level enhancement for it. It's fun and I enjoy it, but no way will I play it over and over and over and over and over just to get the next few levels of the new Incarnate things.

What I would rather see is Incarnate stuff being given as an optional reward in other content, such as finishing some of the old story arcs in Ouroborous, or for finishing the other TF's, especially things like the Shadow Shards. Maybe not have them drop as much as the trials, make that the primary and fastest way to do it, but give us a slightly slower way of getting it via other content, as long as we've opened up the slots.

Or something like that anyway