Solo content.

heh... for my new spines/fa scrapper that's done nothing but solo AE? Yes. He'll be rolling in cash regularly.

For my main claws/sr scrapper? It was bit slower.

EEK. That is a scary article. I am suddenly so grateful that my ADD means I get bored much much faster than an average person. My hatred of literal farming and PVP and raids and patchwork costumes and outleveling my superawesome sword that summoned a dragon and inability to team with whoever I wanted are what drove me away from That Other MMO and IT SAVED ME!

At the time they were released, they were the only way of advancing your character, once you hit 50 and got Hami-O'd out. However, if you wish to concede there were other avenues through you could advance, yes that's true. And that's true of Incarnate Abilities as well. You can advance by doing TFs for Accolades for instance, could advance by grinding through missions for ultra rare recipes, could advance by doing STF/LRSF/Hamidon to replace enhancements. I imagine for some characters, there was a time when the only advancement they even had available was PvP. There is a bit of a difference that, at least, in directly, most of those were also achievable through shear currency.

It's only when the other avenues have been exhausted does it become a solitary path of advancement.

i did mention farming and such for a reason, steel is not generally talking about people at your level of hardcore-ness and i was mentioning that while exceptions like yourself exist, im not seeing a more casual solist like mirai or myself getting a full purple set, or even a number of complete kinetic combats/numis/luck of the gamblers any time soon. but how many allts do you have, how many have you seriously io'd out, my point was that while it was theoretically possible for soloists to achieve io parity before, they had to work a great deal harder, and for those like sam who have a good number of alts, getting a significant number to parity with what dedicated teamers can accomplish with the additional benefits of tf drops, higher kill rates, and additional merits, your post does not really refute that. i had forgotten a-merits, those help for non purple recipies, but still i was saying that there never was full parity between a teamer and a casual solists real likely power levels, unless they play long hours, have insane luck or have frigging spread sheets going, like some-devil i know.

While I am appreciative that you shared that discussion with the dev, I am also amazed that you did since anyone reading it can clearly see you engaged in slander.

The dev said nothing even vaguely like what you claimed.

You claimed "True story: A dev told me in beta they were afraid people wouldn't run the trials they put so much work into if there was an alternative (even if the alternative was slower)."

That isn't even close to what he said. You bolded the relevant parts and they don't support your claim.

They said that making advancement possible via normal content would make it too easy and too quick. You flat out lied.

You claiming "Instead of just making sure the trials are fun and stand on their own merits, they decided to force play of them by making them the only way to advance." is purely your own spin. It comes from your opinion and biases, not to any degree on what the dev actually said.

Honestly, you have engaged in the lowest form of rabble rousing. You are stirring people up with fabrications. Again I'm amazed that you then provided the evidence which destroys your own credibility.

you will likely be able to craft rares in all 4 at that level, provided your teams arent bad, and lb i will just suggest they probably wont be. as for very rares, as you probably noticed with the alphas, very rares really dont enhance things that much, outside of some of the lores. they help, but they are definitely prestige levels, the additional power over rares is frosting, but rares will provide the significant bulk of your power. i didnt see you specify tier 4s, so i didnt take that into account, but i see a good number of players stopping at 3, and i have myself. its where i got my shifts, and its where i got most of my power for relative low investment of time, if you want to run 3-4 times as many to get to the tier 4, then yah, make it higher, but tier 3 is really enough. I actually found that in the time it took me to unlock the slots, i could make tier 3s and never even dealt with t1s or 2s so i started at high strength.

as for you warshade, impressive, ill admit, with rian(my main hero) i have yet to ever get him to a billion inf, and fully slotting him out took significantly longer before i started running tfs(only joined lb a year or so ago) now i was slotting alts as well, so i was raising about 8 chars at once at the 40+ range. and i didnt farm katie or ae, those who did went faster, but for the case of the "regular" player, id be surprised if they got all the ios that a teamer could get it would take longer.

<QR, so sorry if this has been said already>

Never!!? You play six to eight hours a week and you don't think you'll ever be able to get an Incarnate tricked out? Man, I play maybe four or five per week, most of which is not spent on trials, and while I don't have one completely finished yet, I'm making durn good headway. A couple of more months at the outside most, and I should have at least one character done.

That's because you have way too high a standard for what you consider "upper echelons." I'm genuinely curious what you consider that level.

I have to agree with this. People are quite a bit too fixated on the tier 4 stuff when they talk about incarnate content. As Rian said, 90% of the power is available at tier 3, and that honestly isn't really hard to get to. And probably the funniest part of that power is the level shift which doesn't even work outside the trials anyway, so getting them is a moot point for the soloists anyway.

I've got one character tricked out with all tier four because I burned a lot of time on it. I am very unlikely to do it for any others. They will get tier 3s on the level shifts for the sake of doing trials, and maybe get judgement and destiny to tier 3 eventually. Having the actual example of tier 4 over tier 3, I know it's not really that worthwhile for the time spent.

Thus all the wailing about 2.7 years to finish incarnate slotting is pretty much nonsense (well IMO). I am not going to do the comparative math here, but I know getting tier 3 done vs. tier 4 is drastically less time, so it would be a fraction of that total for a realistic incarnate build for someone who didn't have obsessive/compulsive disorder.

Strangely, it's actually Infinity server's turn again tonight

And my location should tell you something esle too

you and i have both been here 7 years, right? are you addicted to an uhealthy degree. furthermore, despite our differences in opinion, we both generally play for the same reason, customization. games do exist to be enjoyable for a long period of time, and behavioral science can definitly enhance one's desire to continue playing a game, but to impart a sinister tone to it is alarmist. you you cosnider yourself, a 7 year vet, to be unhealthy? my love of cheese on my food notwithstanding, id say that im not, despite my being here a amount of time that would seem excessive to outside gamers and VERY attractive to game companies. sometimes doing good business is backed by good science, nothing sinister needed. there is a scientific reason i enjoy lifting weights and practicing karate too(when i finally get back to training ), both of those are healthy behaviors, and dont become more sinister because some basic physiological reinforcers keep me enjoying them.

I did completely neglect to consider those that wish to spread the IO/Purple love around. I have two characters with purples and only BZB gets the hardcore love. Every other character I have will get the unique IOs, maybe some sets, but purples aren't on the menu and what they do get won't show up for the most part until they hit 50. So far, BZB is also the only character to get incarnate buffed.

I think TF's and Trials aren't so much about time as they are about commitment. I play 10 or 15 hours a week, sometimes for hours at a time, but I haven't run many trials because I never know if I'm going to have to log off. In other words, I don't want to commit to something I'm not sure I'll be able to follow through on.

All the trials I've done have been when I know I have the time to do one without having to leave. I can log out in the middle of a mission if I have to, but I would feel like a prize heel if I did that on a TF or Trial.

I do agree there, and I don't think I conveyed very well that I meant time in terms of commitment allocation. Needing to drop everything at random intervals sucks in general for gaming, I agree. Unless you're looking at 'casual' games.

Yeah, except for those people who don't play on Freedom or Virtue because THEY DON'T WANT TO PLAY ON FREEDOM OR VIRTUE.

It wouldn't help those people already on Freedom or Virtue who want to play there next double XP weekend either.

Nonsense. People leave in the middle of the trials all the time. Just pull the plug and everybody will think you crashed.

I think most of us are adults here who understand that sometimes rl gets in the way. RL trumps a trial anyday man.

Well, I saw you but I was on a different trial team.
Then I saw you again as I exited a trial, just as yours zoned in.
Oh well.

I noticed. That's why I made the comment.

Agreed . RL is more important. That said, I do understand the feeling of not wanting to be a heel. And when folks understand your situation, it can make you feel worse about it since you're being a heel to 'good people who understand' then. It's an awkward mess .

But ya, really it isn't too big of a deal with the Trials either with the nature of the size of them. It's a casual raid encounter for the most part, and being short one person shouldn't often cause a problem in the game .

If I believed what you just said I wouldn't've included the log. To my eye he said they intentionally excluded any alternate methods to make sure people played the trials (his reason was that if enough people weren't playing them, anyone who might be interested couldn't find a team). He expressly said that if they included alternate methods, people would do those instead of the trials.

If you don't believe that's what was in the text, fine. You're allowed your own interpretation of the conversation. But I was told flat-out, we intentionally didn't include alternate options because then people wouldn't play the trials. In the text I even disagreed, saying that I feel the trials have enough merits to stand on their own.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Thanks for the info. I'm willing to bet then that the people I've been seeing talk about 100+ trials are trying to get multiple characters through the system. I probably just misunderstood and thought they meant ONE character.

Thank you. I will admit I lead a bit of a charmed existence when it comes to drops. I seem to get purple drops quite often when I play my 50's, a fact that has caused my friends I run with to curse me to no end. Also, when I decide to really go for broke on a character's build I tend to play that character exclusively until it's "done," then I move on to the next one.

So I suppose that yeah, I'm not really your typical soloist, and that I probably should have pointed that out when I mentioned the time it took to get my Warshade's build together. But you are right, a soloist would definitely take longer than a teamer to "IO out". My original point was not really about the time spent so much as it was that it could be done. To my knowledge with the current setup of the Incarnate system, a soloist literally cannot progress through it at all beyond the Alpha slot.

You can get shards soloing paper missions. If memory serves, I was getting around 8 an hour ripping through them at full tilt at +0/x8/yes/yes difficulty.

We'll say 5 hours of that. Per day.

Of the 40 shards, once a day you can swap 10 shards for 10 threads. For the other 30, you get cut in half.

25 threads a day. 5 common pieces every 4 days. You can extrapolate from there what it would take to unlock the 4 incarnate buffs and craft even tier 3 pieces. It's a loooooonnng farkin ride.

Or just run 3-4 incarnate trials a night (that's only 2 hours a night) for 9 days or so.

Ah I see now. There is technically a solo way to do it, but it's prohibitively long and expensive in terms of inf. I was under the impression that to unlock everything past Alpha, you absolutely had to do the trials. I just looked them up on the Wiki and see now that you can technically purchase even the unlocks with threads and inf. I say technically because from what I'm seeing of the conversion costs and time required, you'd have to be freakin' nuts to do it that way.

Yeah........that sucks.

And thus the multiple threads on the topic.

Fully incarnated with tier 4s in everything within a month easily on teams versus a path that ... as you put it, is freaking nuts and would involve so much time that you might get done before the servers are shut down but you'll have to work pretty hard at it.

no question that he current setup is prohibitive, but as of the ustream chat a few weeks ago, they know we want a solo option that is a bit more viable, they, in the past have implemented things they knew that the community wanted, but it takes time. Right now they are going for a traditional raiding endgame and need to fill it a bit fuller than just 2 trials over and over, once that is added to a point that it is satisfactory, I would be very surprised if they did not also have some form of slower solo advancement as well. my chief warning was that trapdoor and the fun twins are also solo content, and several players had significant trouble with them.

so solo content does not mean content that is easily soloed by everyone. i shredded them with rian and violet, a scrapper and a dom, and they were significantly harder with my defenders. so brace for the content to be a bit tougher initially, much like the rials were when, in the first week they were impossible to complete, but now people with the proper experience go through them efficiently.i'm trying to head that reaction off so i don't wind up punching my computer screen forums are starting to get to me a bit.

Lol, I hear ya on the forums getting to you. They pretty much did get to me over the weekend and I've had to take a step back.

I fully expect any solo Incarnate story arcs to be challenging. I wouldn't have it any other way. Not saying you feel this way at all, but I get the impression from lots of people that they think "solo" automatically means "super easy." It doesn't necessarily mean that at all. I think it would be highly unrealistic for people to expect to be able to take any random build and solo endgame material with it.

I suppose what really bugs me about the recent announcement is the types of things they're choosing to hang off the endgame system as carrots. I'll admit I'm more than a little irritated at the capes and auras for alts at level 1. I understand the desire to give people plenty of incentive and a variety of goals for the endgame, but I just don't feel giving advantages (albeit cosmetic ones) to alts is the right idea. Especially not when those advantages are features that have been requested for the core game for quite some time. It reminds me of the criticism they got for having the Super Tailor as part of the Science booster. A lot of people were unhappy with that one too.

Ah well, here's to hoping they do indeed unveil a solo system at some point. I won't lie, I would prefer it be sooner rather than later. And honestly, I think that would be good for the playerbase. If nothing else, it would defuse the growing split over this issue before it gets any worse.