Returning Player: Some Questions

"People are like stained-glass windows.
They sparkle and shine when the sun is out,
but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is
light from within"

Overview here: http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Incarnate_System but in summary...

Mender Ramiel in Ouroboros gives the "Incarnate Unlocked" arc. After than, any mobs that are Even Level to you or above (regardless of exemplaring, etc) can drop Shards. Shards can be used to make components that make Alpha abilities.

Running Incarnate Trials (Usually form in Pocket D as there isn't a "contact" as such, they use the LFG tab) both earns you iXP to unlock the other Incarnate slots and mobs on them drop Threads, which are like shards but for all 5 of the currently available Incarnate abilities (Including Alpha, you can use Threads or Shards to make them). You also get components dropped for getting Trial Badges and completing the trials.

There's still AE farming, it's not as bad as it was, but servers like Freedom are still full of people either demanding or advertising PLing at lot of the time. I've never really had an issue with it on the (Formerly) EU servers or Victory.

Welcome back! Hope you enjoy all the new features!

There are two methods to unlock the Alpha slot. The original way is to go to Ouroboros and run the mission arc from Mendor Ramiel. When you finish the arc, your Alpha slot will be unlocked. The new way is to earn Incarnate Experience by running any of the BaF, Lambda, or Keyes iTrials. You may need to run several of these trials to fully unlock the slot as, just with regular experience, you only get a portion of the whole for each trial run.

Click on the Powers button on your powers tray, which should open up to two headings: Combat Attributes and Incarnate Abilities. Click on Incarnate Abilities. This will open a window where you can craft all the abilities and see all the stats on them. Take special note that the Alpha slot can be slotted using two different system of components. Paragonwiki can be your friend here in seeing all that is involved with each system.

I don't run AE a lot, due to these very issues. But, I have taken a new character to the mid-teens solely through use of the AE and have not run into any obsessant farmers, players looking for PL handouts, etc. recently. Not sure to what level that is not occurring, but I haven't seen it. Now, that hasn't stopped people from making purely farm missions in AE. You just have to wade through that to find the real mission gems. I'd recommend looking at this thread for a start at decent AE content: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=263350

To expand on this, its not exclusively Pocket D. The RWZ is very popular on some servers as well, and the Midnighter's Club and Cim are also used regularly too, basically Co-op zones. In reality you can queue yourself into the Team-Up-Teleporter (TUT) from any non-instanced zone and eventually end up on a league. In practice though, most people seem to be creating a pre-formed league in the co-op zones and entering the trials via the TUT that way.

A league btw, is basically a group of teams (up to 6 teams, but the max for any trial currently is 3 teams or 24 characters).

Here's more info on some of the stuff I mentioned from the wiki:

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Issue_...king_For_Group
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/League

Also, here is the wiki listing of the issue updates. There have been a lot of changes since the AE was put in (which was issue 14...we just got 20.5 the last few weeks or so).

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Issues

Oh...and welcome back!

To add to what flipside is saying, you might try something that I find *VERY* useful: on all my level 50s, I bind a key to open (or close) the Incarnate Abilities window:

/bind i toggle incarnate

You can, of course, use any key instead of "i", but I find personally that I don't use that key for anything else, and it kind of fits nicely, too.

Best of luck with the new content!

Great suggestion!

Hey, passing that around is my shtick! :P Of course, can't recall where I first saw that bind

It is.

Well stop slacking!