So with the new lore pets...

Im prolly gonna spell this wrong.

On my Mind/Psi dom I want to go for the Rulaaru. Shes in a constant sleep/dream state so I thought they were nightmarish enough to be psionic manifestations of her nightmares.

That works. I have a Jack O' Lantern toon and the closest thing theme wise for him is the Rularuu. I still want to go Cimeroran though...just b/c who didn't get owned by these guys in one or two hits before?

I would like the Phantom Lore pets to look more like COT ghosts in stead of regular white avatars.

I would love to see Circle of Thorns Behemoths and Behemoth Overlords added as Lore Pets.

I would like to see the following added for lore.


CoT Behemoth Overlord

CoT Hellfrost

Fir Bolg Streng

Winter Horde Snow Beast

Council Eclipse Warwolf

So, on the topic of Lore "essences" and the ghostly aura they have: when the Lore slot was in Beta, it originally only had the 4 Praetorian trees, but without the aura or the word "essence" in their names when summoned. At the time, I and others thought that this would be it for the tree, that these would be the only options that would ever be in the Lore tree (after all, there was very little precedent to getting new powers in a powerset).

I made a big post about it, and made two points. The first, and the most important to me, was that it would fit very few concepts to have the ability to summon Praetorian Loyalist troops. The second was that it made no sense within the lore whatsoever for Incarnates to summon troops from one specific faction in one specific dimension that, for most of the playerbase, wasn't their home dimension. Compounding that, it happened to be our enemies. There was no precedent for any Incarnate in the game summoning Praetorian Loyalist troops, not even Tyrant (though it would obviously make sense if he could). The only Incarnate with summoning powers is Lord Recluse, and he summons Arachnos troops, not Praetorian Loyalists. I then pointed out the irony of the slot being named "Lore" when looked at from this perspective.

So, I gave two suggestions. The first suggestion was to change the name of the slot to Leadership, and allow us to create a sidekick/lackey-- the idea being that as an Incarnate, you are so influential that someone significant. Ideally it would use the character creator for the costume, but for balance's sake, they'd give us set options for powers. I gave examples of character types that I considered to be iconic for the genre (SS/Inv, MA/SR, Energy/Force Field, etc.). So, you'd pick a character type, and customize the costume, and have your own sidekick. This was the ideal option, in my mind, however, I knew there were technical limitations for customizing with Mastermind pets, so I suggested as an alternative version, allowing you to pick from some of the established characters in the game as a sidekick/lackey (like Flambeaux, Hollow Point, but good lord, not Fusionette). This obviously would be less ideal, as people would have multiple Flambeauxs running around.

I considered the Leadership idea to be the best because it has nothing to do with your concept, aside from the idea that you are looked up to by another person.

The second suggestion, if the first wasn't possible, was to have a sort of primal forces mastery slot, that gave somewhat generic elemental pets like Fire/Ice/Earth/Electricity elementals. This would fit less concepts than the Leadership idea, but more than having Praetorians follow them all over the place.

There was discussion over the idea, and a suggestion that came up from another poster (I know who it was, but I don't want to out them as the originator of the idea given the hostility to it in this thread, but I bet they'll just speak up anyway if they see it) was to give the Praetorian pets the ghostly aura, and say that they were essences summoned from the well, like the ones in the Ramiel arc. I said that would be better than nothing, as it resolved the second complaint, but I really wanted something that would fit more concepts.

We got the aura.

Then one issue later we got tons of Lore pets that rendered the whole argument pretty pointless (though if we hadn't had it, we may not have gotten those pets, or at least not as quickly, as they told us that our objections to the Praetorians led to the additional options being added to that issue), and we still had the essence thing that imposed the Well concept on us even though the non-Praetorian pets made that unnecessary.

So, at the time, the essence concept seemed like a resource-efficient idea for resolving one of the issues with the Lore slot, but now that the first issue was resolved through the extra options, the essence aura actually conflicts with concept flexibility since it forces the concept of the Well on your character's powers. So, yeah, I'd really like to see the aura and the name suffix at least be optional. Hopefully the developers will find a way to do that for us.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I'm at least partially to blame for that, and that they did it because we asked them to in Beta. I'm sorry that it resulted in people being somewhat unhappy with the end result (myself included), but the developers did listen to us, even if the result wasn't ideal in the end.