Heelllloooooo Scrappers!!!

Hi all

Slow week for purple drops, just one and it was the Immobilise set.

Did the Incarnate intro arc with a couple of friends for my Spines Dark Scrapper then again solo for my Bots Traps MM and Crab Spider. On my way to getting the Shards together for their first Alpha slot enh.

Have to keep my ears open for the Trials now.

It is probably small beer but I have marked all my level 50 toons down to do the SSA twice a week now, once for the Align Merit and once for the Astral Merit, and use the Astral Merit to get an extra Shard. Seems worth while to get each toon their initial Alpha enh, probably less worth while after that.

I also found that my Vigilante Controller could do the SSA on Red and Blue side for an Astral Merit on each, not sure it is equal to being able to get the Hero/Villain Merits, but something to note down.

Continuing to add IO sets to all my characters. Going to make my second build with Screwloose taking the Soul Mastery PPP which means I will need a whole new set of Enh before I can really take him out for a roll, but also means I get to keep the other build in case I feel like changing my mind.

Hope you are all having fun.

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

The primary "benefit" of Shards (other than the ability to turn extra ones into threads) is just that getting enough trial-specific Incarnate salvage to craft four Rare/Very Rare powers has has taken enough time already that I don't want to increase that time running the same trials 25% to get the components for Alpha, too. I view using the TF drops (and thus Shards) for Alpha as keeping things a bit more varied.

Now that the Underground Trial offers a guaranteed Rare or Very Rare at the end, I expect the average number of trials required to top out all four powers to drop, so my view on that may change.

You returned to the game with 75 million influence and now have over 2 billion?!?

So I'm guessing the routine is not to worry too much about IO sets until you are 50, which presumably allows you to start bringing in real influence?

Thanks for the info!

Hi all

Bit of a short week as I took a couple of days off work and went to visit my mum for her birthday so was AFK for 4 days.

Since last post got a few more of my characters thru the Incarnate intro. Highlight was a 6 man team led by our resident high difficulty SG member. So we had 2 Tankers, 3 Blasters and a Scrapper set to +3/x8, which was fine until we got to the end of the Rikti War Zone mission and ran into 2 level 53 AVs. Was a heck of a fight and we had a few have to drag themselves off the carpet, but in the end we were victorious.

Got enough Shards together to put the End reduction Alpha on my Spines Dark and it made an immediate difference. I am working him back over to the Blue Side and keeping my ears open for Trial runs. Also decided to try the Recharge Alpha on my Crab Spider to see how often I could get the Pets and AEs going off. First result was that it was a lot easier to run my End bar down, so I am guessing my output is up, just have to relearn what a reasonable amount of button mashing is.

Was happy to learn that I can get Shard drops when playing at lower levels with my SG mates, makes teaming with them more profitable.

Used my AFK time to replenish my supplies of rare salvage. Had a lot of characters put multiple bids in at 920K for each of the high level rare salvages and bought a lot. Only item that didn’t dip to that level over the weekend seems to have been Platinum which I got hardly any of.

Also sold a bunch of stuff at good prices. Have to have a bit of a clean up and take down and repost some stuff I made poor decisions when setting the price for.

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Hi all

Bit of an interesting week. Got another two purple recipe drops (Hold and Confuse), got to get my stuff together and actually try to slot one of these things in a character now.

I did the hero and villain SSA part 3. Some pretty nice story writing and well coordinated between the two sides of the story.

Got another character through the Incarnate unlock, only two more to go I think.

Got a random tell from someone I didn’t know to do a MortiCal when I was on my Mastermind. Not a bad set of missions, although I need to do it slower to pick up all of what was going on. Got myself a Notice of the Well. What do people do with these? Also I think I have enough Shards to make my initial Alpha Slot Enh, but nothing is immediately obvious for a Mastermind, any thoughts?

I did a bunch of Flashback stuff with Screwloose over the weekend. It was interesting because I was one Alignment mission short of him getting back to Hero so I got to do a bunch of the low level Villain content and then some of the newer low level Hero content. Probably could have spent my time more constructively, but was interesting to see the low level content I hadn’t done before with that character and I did get some shard drops, bunches of reward merits, a bunch of medium value salvage and one 50 Mil recipe drop.

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Notice of the Well is a piece you need for the tier 3 Alpha if you're using Shards to make it.

They're also used to make the Tier 4 (Very Rare) component, a Favor of the Well. (This takes 2 Notices and 32 Shards.)

If you aren't using Shards to make things, a Notice can be broken down into 40 threads, which can be handy. Even though you can only get one per week (per character) I like to save a few of them up over time, since that can be a quick way to get a big burst of threads at a later time if you decide you want to craft something Incarnatey in a hurry.

Thanks, Claws, Uber.

I have been doing most of my Alpha crafting from Shards as I haven’t managed to get myself on any Incarnate trials yet.

Overall I have been pretty happy with my progress with the Alpha slots. All the characters I have played are making progress without really trying anything much different to what they would be doing anyway. For my Incarnate unlocked characters I tend to play at +0/x3 so I am KOing a lot of even level or better critters and the Shard drop rate seems fairly decent.

So far my three most played characters have gotten together the 12 Shards required for the Tier 1 Alpha enh. End reduction for my Scrapper, Recharge reduction for my Crab Spider and Damage for my Mastermind. And after my big weekend on Flashbacks for Screwloose he had enough Shards to go to the Tier 2 Alpha Enh, I saved some Shards by making the Grai Matter with Vanguard Merits.

I did get a go at the WST last night, Admiral Sutter. It was a pretty good TF, but with only 5 of us we couldn’t finish off the last Double AV fight. I rekon I can get some of my SG mates to have a go at the 2nd Respec for the WST this week and that should get me a Notice of the Well. Then I’ll just wait for the Shards to build up and bingo Tier 3.

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

You may or may not know this already, but you can actually break components down into shards as well. I used Vanguard Merits for several Grai Matters when I was getting my Alpha slot abilities and broke them down into shards for crafting other components.

What has your problem been getting on Incarnate Trials? If it's your personal schedule, then i22 will be a huge benefit to you with the solo Incarnate path being created in the revamped Dark Astoria. If you haven't seen any being formed, you may need to update your global channels since the main ones might be different for your server now. You might also consider trying out another server, now that we get free transfers each month. I personally play on Guardian, and there are typically trials running every time I log on. They are easy enough to start too by broadcasting in the appropriate channels. You'll usually get at least one person who is willing to take the lead from you if you get a league formed up.

@Rorn ---- Blue Baron ---- Guardian

Vanguard Merits -> Grai Matter -> Shards worth remembering. The only lurg I have used a little so far was to use Astral Merits to buy Shards. On reflection it probably isn’t the most efficient way of generating Shards or the best use of Astral Merits, but it has the advantage that you can spend an Astral Merit on one character to get a Shard on a different character.

My main handicap in getting into trials, and all larger raid-ish content, is time zone. I am in the GMT+10 Australia time zone so population can be a bit sparse except on weekends.

Also I was holding back a little til I got some idea what the Incarnate grind was going to be like. Whether I really had to do the Trials to get anywhere or if I could make reasonable progress without the Raids. My feeling so far is that I am happy with my rate of progress.

If you calculate the steepness of any Game Grind as (Effort + Difficulty of Access) / (Fun + Progress) then I get a good deal of Fun out of just plain playing my characters so my Progress doesn’t need to be enormous to make the Grind steepness fairly acceptable. Given that I am also making Progress relating to Alignment Merits, Salvage and Recipes in the same activity that lubricates the Grind a little as well. If the only way I could get Progress was to do activities that were very Difficult to Access then that would make the Grind pretty steep for me, but given that I can get Progress just doing Tips and Content that I would be doing anyway the Difficulty of Access is Zero.

One thing that I was surprised at was that the “Even Level” qualification for critters to drop Shards is based on your combat level. So when I am playing with my SG mates lower level characters I still get Shard drops.

I am generally not a great fan of large raid style content so I am looking forward to the new Dark Astoria content. I can see my SG mates getting their teeth into that pretty strongly. Having support for different styles of play (Solo, Teams, Raids) is IMHO important to a game and I think it is something that CoH/V does a pretty good job of.

All my active characters are on Justice and I am in the Australia and Justice Badges channels where I see the calls go out fairly often, especially on the weekends. If I had no viable alternatives for Incarnate progress then I would feel a bit ticked off. I dislike feeling forced to do something even if it is something that gets me desired progress. I would still like to see the Incarnate Trials, but if it doesn’t happen for a few more weeks I won’t be worried.

The Transfer option is an interesting idea. I don’t think it would help me a lot because of the Time Zone issue, but it might be an option over the Xmas-NYear break when I will be off work for a couple of weeks and be at home for most of it.

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Hi all

Bit of a slow week. Got enough shards on my Tank to get his first Alpha slot enh, went for Resistance although it seems a little overkill for most situations.

Hit up the Flashback over the weekend doing some Hero-side Badge missions for my Crab Spider and some Croatoa story content. Not sure I am going to go back to Croatoa, salvage drops were nice, but the critters there are pretty darn annoying.

Can’t say I haven’t done any iTrials now. Got into a Lambda trial which seemed pretty chaotic and we ended up failing. Chat afterwards seemed to suggest this is rare and no one was talking up doing it again. Got my Scrapper about 45% of the exp for the slot, a few threads, a couple of Astral Merits and an uncommon salvage piece so wasn’t bad for a fail I guess. Another run like that I should be well set to pick a Proc slot enh.

I got a third piece of the purple pbae set off a SG mate for market rates and have started putting in some bids for the remaining bits. Have to leave the bids in a while see if I get any bites.

Weekly Strike Targets are working up my agenda of things to do as I get some characters near to their first Tier 3 Alpha enh.

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Welcome back, your posts were always entertaining, glad to see you back...

Hi all

Had a pretty productive week in Paragon.

Joined a couple more Global channels for Justice and once I remembered to put them into the tabs I had open I saw a lot more chat. Got me into another incarnate trial which seemed a lot easier than the last one and got me a bunch of good stuff. Also got me into a Numina TF while it was the WST so I got a Notice of the Well and moved Screwloose up to a Tier 3 Alpha enh.

After my second iTrial and another run of the SSA I had enough iThread resources to put together my Interface slot and went for the Degenerative (-Max HP) proc. I haven’t noticed it much, is there a graphic I should be looking for or does it only fire in Incarnate content? Everything I have found says that the Interface Procs work “in most” attacks, anyone have anything more informative than “in most”?

Spent a bunch of the Reward Merits I had accumulated on a couple of recipes that looked like they were going to be hard to get through the Auction House. The recent sales were only in the 20 mil range but there were a lot more Buyers than Sellers so it seemed easier to use my Reward Merits.

I have been logging a lot of characters off in Ouroboros for the extra recipe day job bonus. Anyone got any preferences about what Day Job bonuses they think are worth going after?

Not picked up any more of my purple pbae set from the auction house, might have to up my bids. Is it worth slotting it in one of my PBAE toggles, I was thinking Death Shroud, or should I put it in Spine Burst and try to remember to use Spine Burst more rigorously?

Regards, Screwloose
“I am not young enough to know everything.”

Screwloose,

The general rule (if memory serves) is that if a power accepts damage enhancements, it can proc Interface.

Later on,
Gate