The inf cost of becoming an Incarnate?

So here is a question for all those players out there with fully slotted Incarnate trees. What sort of influence/infamy costs are we talking about here to acquire these Incarnate abilities, typically speaking? A billion per tier per category?

it depends on how patient you are and how many trials you run lol

doing it entirely with shards to threads then making everything from that will take a VERY long time and be VERY expensive

doing only trials you can get away with not spending a single inf if you save up emps for rare/very rare components that you dont get on trials

i personally only throw inf to convert shards to threads and convert threads to xp which is ~50-100 mil per toon

Typically, you can expect an outlay of approximately 0 influence to get a complete set of incarnate powers. If you are impatient and buy XP with threads, that can jump to as much as a few tens of millions.

Unless you have horrific luck (and don't use empyrean merits for some reason), you should not usually need to use the expensive recipes to craft rare and very rare components.

As mentioned, it doesn't have to cost you any inf. If you're patient and/or willing to run a fair number of iTrials, you will get everything you need as drops.

I have run 10 characters through the iTrials enough to get them to either 3 VR and 1 Rare, or four VR abilities, not including Alpha which I had already gotten to VR status before the iTrials came out. Doing so required around 50 iTrial runs per character. Some were less, some were more. This was without spending Empyreans or down-converting any VR or Rare components. (When I was lucky enough to get spares, I held on to them and used them to make other abilities.)

If you get unlucky or impatient, and I did a couple of times, the only inf-based cost I was willing to spend on progress was the 25M inf investment to convert four Uncommon components and 100 Threads into a Rare. For most purposes, I don't think the 100M option for a Very Rare is worth it, not at least because it also requires four Rare components

If you have to ask, you can't afford to be a god.

Of course, if you don't intend to run any Incarnate Trials more than once, then the higher tiers become less interesting to you, anyway. Only one level shift applies outside the trials, which you can get that with a Tier 3 Alpha. That can be filled with components from high level TFs and the Weekly Strike Force, and shards from all content.

So I would say:

- Open the Alpha slot ASAP on a character, to start benefitting from shard drops.
- Use shards and TF components eventually to create an Alpha Tier 3 of your choice.
- Run each Trial once, and then at the end of it see what you have unlocked, and how you want to spend the components earned.

I was away from CoH for about 2 years, and I just returned about 3 weeks ago. I was not here for the initial roll-out of the Incarnate stuff, but have been running a lot of trials and TFs since I returned.

In those 3 weeks I have not converted any shards to threads, nor have I upgraded any Incarnate salvage (no rare to very rare stuff). I *have* downgraded a few uncommons to commons. You need less uncommons than you do commons, To mkae a power T4 you would need 2 uncommons, 2 rares, 1 VR and 12 commons (I think it is 12, might be off on that).

In my 3 weeks of playing, I have unlocked my Alpha on my main, crafted a T4 Spiritual, T4 Musculature, T4 Cardiac, T4 Pyronic Judgement, T4 Reactive Interface, T4 Lore Robotic Drones (Assault and Laser), T3 Lore IDF (Shield Drone and ACU), T4 Clarion, T3 Ageless, and a T3 Rebirth.

I have also used the Astral merit conversion to unlock the Alpha on 2 other toons (that would have trouble running the Alpha Arc solo). I currently have 112 Astral Merits and 29 Emperyan Merits.

I have also earned close to 500,000,000 Inf while doing this (not counting the Purple Recipe I found and sold for 600,000,000, as that was pure luck).

I have found the Incarnate system to be a lot of fun, not much grind and definately worth the time invested.

Of course I was also playing Dungeons and Dragons Online for quite a while, and the "end game" of crafting Epic Items in DDO is vastly slower than Incarnates in CoH. In DDO I made the "Epic Sword of Shadow" (the most powerful 2-handed weapon in the game, at that time). To craft that Item you had to acquire the Shard of the SoS, Seal of the SoS and Scroll of the SoS and then combine them. The Scroll was a random drop from any *mininon* in the appropriate pack of content but was very expensive to buy, costing roughly the same amount of gold (actually platinum, but more people recognize gold as a standard currency) that could be carried by 3 toons holding all the gold the game would allow. The Seal dropped only at the ends of a few missions, and it took me 197 completions of 1 mission to get that Seal. And those missions are on a "hard timer" of 18 hours, so only 1 mission per day for your chance at the Seal. The Shard dropped only in the end of a Raid with a 3 day timer... took me about 1 year to make the final item.

The reason I mention my experience in DDO is to point out that the Incarnate system in CoH moves much, much faster than the end game content in DDO, and much faster than the end game in many other MMOs. I am very happy with my return to CoH, and the Incarnate system is a large part of that.

It will cost absolutely nothing in Inf to complete your incarnate slots. I made 2 toons all tier 4 within 2 weeks of release. 1 in a week. Another 80% T4. All it costs is the amount of time you want to have the fun making them incarnate.

well it is a little grindy, which is why i dont participate in trials all the time now, i mostly tfs and other non trial stuff and just convert shards when convenient

currently i have 2 pools of 50s, those which have alphas slotted up to tier 4 and those which are not alpha to tier 4, once they are alpha to tier 4 i start taking them on incarnate trials to work on other slots, before i do that though i usually convert extra shards to threads and then do threads to xp to help unlock the slot faster

the more you run the trials however the faster you will unlock upper tier incarnates (my main has had to run all the trials quite a bit for badges and atm he has a tier 4 alpha, tier 4 judgement, tier 4 interface, tier 4 destiny, and 5 tier 4 lores), most of my other toons which casually run the trials when i feel like doing them have tier 4 alphas, and then usually get up to at least tier 3 in the non alpha slots

The voucher unlocks the alpha slot, basically saving you the time it takes you run Ramiel's arc. It doesn't give you anything to put in the slot, though.