The Purpose of Essentially Making Shards Obsolete?

Perhaps I missed something, perhaps I misunderstood an aspect of the incarnate lore, but what purpose did replacing shards with threads serve? The only reason I can fathom is preventing players from hording shards pre-i20, then spending them all once it came out, resulting in them not needing to perform the incarnate trials.

It just seems to me that Issue 20 has overridden most of the previous work made towards the incarnate system. I certainly don't see many people participating in the Weekly Strike Force, let alone other TF's throughout the game. I suppose what I am trying to say is that these new systems are replacing the old content, rather than building upon what we already have. The game feels disjointed, and this makes me a sad panda.

P.S. I DO enjoy the incarnate system, and i20. I just wish it was integrated with the rest of the game in a better fashion.

Shards are technically not obsolete. You can still get them on non-incarnate content. Threads you can get only on the 2 incarnate trials.

As far as why...I guess they wanted incarnate stuff to ONLY be unlocked/slotted by doing the 2 trials, not in any other way.

But at least the shards can be converted 10:10 to threads, so it's ok.

Shards I think were handled fine, what surprised me is that the notice of the well is not used for any of the new stuff. That would keep people interested in the WSF.

Also, we don't know what will be used in later slots or newer recipes. They added thread recipes for alpha slots, might add shard components for an upgrade to a thread-based very rare or who knows what else.

The devs had to come up with a new icurrency (threads) because people were hoarding shards by the hundreds. If they had kept shards as the de factor icurrency, it is conceivable that some people would be running around with all of their Tier 4s slotted during the first day of i20 release.

It's the standard game of one-upsmanship. Some players think they can anticipate the devs moves and try to get ahead of the game. The devs, sensing this, would then throw a curveball into their plans. Expect to see more versions of icurrencies with the future release of incarnate slots. Or, the devs might just switch back to shards if they find out that the hoarders have indeed exhausted their supply of shards by converting them into threads.

Not if you want to do something besides grind the incarnate trials with your playtime. Sometimes I only have an hour to play - I *could* spend it looking for a trial (usually fast), waiting for a trial to fill (usually slower), and running that trial (yay), and often I do. However, just as often I'll take that hour and run tip missions or a few missions of a story arc or something rather than stand around goofing around with my powers waiting for a trial to start (or spend the entire time NOT getting a trial by using the LFG feature, which has happened. Spent an hour in the queue with a wait time of a few minutes while whacking cold demons for cold hearted. After I was done went to a warzone and got in a trial in 3 minutes.)

To spite the Villains the Devs hate.

But since the Devs have turned Vigilante, they don't care about the collateral damage to heroes.

You see the entire idea of this "content" has me baffled.

I see people saying well it is harder therefore it requires more skill. Then they say well it only takes 30 minutes and you don't have to finish it to get the reward.

I look at Hero Merits, they require 2 days to complete and 11 missions and yet the reward for that is LESS than the reward for a 30 minute trial.

Risk versus reward or farm versus actual varied play?

Having the trials unlock the other slots makes sense. I mean we run the Mender arc and we unlock our Alpha. Then we can run ANY content and progress towards your first incarnate ability. I can run the weekly TF, do AE missions, do a regular TF, do tips, do mission arcs and get shards or run trials which I can exchange for Alpha content.

In the new stuff I have 2 trials that I must farm to progress. The Devs have went out of their way to make any earlier rewards difficult to exchange for the new stuff - but the new stuff can easily exchange for the old stuff.

So is this the goal to enforce farming? Is this our new direction? I would seriously like to hear from a red name on this subject - since the loss of Castle and Bab's we rarely hear a word and when we do its marketing. How about some word on what the plan is?

Risk versus rewards and Time versus rewards. How about we get a chance for an Incarnate salvage drop for a mission arc completion? Morality mission completion? I mean I put far more time into a mission arc or Morality completion than I do for a Baf or Lambda. Perhaps I am just not getting it but the rewards used to be commeasurate to the time/difficulty in this game.

You do realize this is false right?

If you use shards it will take you 2 years to get your Incarnate slots completed. This has already been shown. So this is my entire point. I farm or I don't advance. This goes against every single thing that this game has stood for the last 7 years.

Farming was not an approved thing - remember the wolf farms? Remember adding TIMERS to farm missions. The Devs have over the years made many changes to stop farming and then they add "content" that is a farm...............

Yes, the latest tier of Incarnate content is basically a huge repetition-driven reward schedule, and the powers they've introduced are largely unimaginative, homogenizing tripe:

Everyone now gets a Tier9 so awesome it makes the actually Tier 9 powers look like a joke. Everyone now gets a summonable pet, nevermind if you didn't want to play a pet-based hero/villain. Everyone now gets a giagantic AOE team buff, regardless of whether their concept was for a support character.

And of course to earn it, everyone has to run the same pair of trials over and over and over.