I am not appreciating the Trial Grind

If you're going to ape the 'heroic' nature of the MMO market's big gorilla, you really should wait until you have a comparable amount of content to repeat.

I mean that game has what, seven to ten different maps that can be played at end game, once a day each?

Where as we have, two, soon to be three, which can be repeated as many times as you want each day.

Personally I belive they should of waited until they had at least five or six trials together, before launching the Incarnate Trial system.

I'm pretty sure the reason they had to implement the shard to thread conversion mechanic is because they didn't want people with stockpiled shards to be able to have all their new stuff slotted without doing a BAF or Lambda once. They're putting out new content and they want the community to have incentive to play it. If you could just use the shards and components you've had stockpiled for a year on all the new stuff, why would you bother running trials at all? I would hate to spend a bunch of time designing new and challenging content for an awesome game and not be able to offer a new and unique reward for completing it.

If the developers were so paranoid about players not playing the trials, I would have thought a far more elegant solution would have been to keep a few components locked behind them the same way that you can't craft a tier 3 Alpha ability without a Notice of the Well. (Therefore obliging you to either cough up 80 shards or, far easier, run whatever the WST was that week.) That way, you could still make some progress doing other content but would have to try the trials in order to complete your recipe requirements.

Instead, by locking them all behind the new trials, it's impossible to progress in any meaningful way outside of the trials. Oh, and of course, we then get a fun* new currency and yet more annoying, story-free, hideous looking vendors cluttering up the place.



(*For 'fun' read 'unnecessary and confusing'. The sarcasm lever seems to be set to 'high' today. )

Personally, what I think we need is an Incarnate difficulty setting. Flip it on and any TF you form is scaled to 54, mobs get the boosted tohit like they do in trials, and incarnate abilities including all level shifts function regardless of the original level of the TF. Threads would drop instead of shards and at the end of the TF you get a choice of taking incarnate salvage instead of reward merits, possibly with shorter or easier TFs giving commons/uncommings and longer or difficult ones giving rares/very rares, or just leave them as random and have a TF give you X pieces of salvage based on the length of the TF like how merits are awarded.

All it requires is level 54 versions of mobs which for many groups don't exist at the moment, and admittedly that's a fairly hefty chunk of development to make those. Especially if they decide to throw in little mob-specific gimmicks like how the 9CUs in the BAF gain damage buffs over time if you leave them alone. But it'd open up all the existing content as potential paths to incarnate power, and take the game back to being able to do whatever you feel like on any given day and still make noticable progress, even if that progress isn't necessarily optimal. Especially if they extend it to Ouroboros arcs which are technically TFs, mechanically. And AE arcs which are the same but would be way harder to balance.