The first concern that jumps out at me is how the rest of a team will deal with having something that's challenging to an Incarnate pop up in their spawn. This was an issue even back in the days of paper-and-dice Champions: "one player gets the points for the Hunted, but everyone has to fight them."
Carrying on from that analogy, it was not uncommon for the dice to land such that several characters' special enemies would show up during the same adventure, or even the same fight. This had the potential to strain credulity and/or make that fight much more difficult.
My characters at Virtueverse
Faces of the City
Added difficulty is the point. Incarnate powers tend to make conventional fights trivial.
To clarify, having this new system would mean that incarnate powers would be available while exemplared, minus the level shifts as that wouldn't make mechanical sense, not sure how that would pan out though. Food for thought I guess.
Also, I did put in a stipulation in there about hopefully adding in a setting to the Notoriety contacts to toggle this mechanic on/off. Perhaps it should apply per team leader's setting, that way folks that lead teams don't have to constantly tell the revolving door of team mates to turn on/off this system.
Just setting it once for yourself and the team remains set that way until either you, the leader, changes it, or another person becomes leader.
You do bring up a good point though, since the drops only pertain to incarnates, I'm wondering if perhaps something worthwhile for non incarnates can drop from them.
Not sure what that could be though, perhaps a chance to get one of those new super inspirations? Thoughts?
But I want to point out that these foes will be designed to be "anti Incarnates" sort of like how Voids/Quantums are "anti Kheldian". So they will present more of a threat to Incarnates and less of a threat to non incarnates, in a similar way that the Voids/Quantums work on mixed teams.
"All that crap is grey to me, no XP." - Positron 5/15/05 8:36am . . . The world stopped and silence ensued except for the sound of a crying infant off in the distance.
"Everyone needs to chill the hell out." - BackAlleyBrawler 11/13/08 3:26pm . . . Geeks around the world stopped and blinked.
What would happen to Kheldian Incarnate, then?
second measure posted that there will be some talk of the solo incarnate path at the player summit in november
Quantum incarnate ... or the more dreded "incarnate enhanced crystal (can't think of the name"
Quote:
In other words, a sure fire way to ensure that no Peacebringer or Warshade with Incarnate abilities unlocked will ever get invited into a team or a league ever again!
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Originally Posted by Twigman
Quantum incarnate ... or the more dreded "incarnate enhanced crystal (can't think of the name"
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come to think of it ... I haven't noticed any quantums in the incarnate trials ... has anyone else?
Yes, I'm aware of the upcoming solo incarnate content, this suggestion is a supplemental system, it works whether solo, teamed, etc. Just as Voids/Quantums aren't a solo or teamed system, they just "happen" as you play.
I never mentioned segregating Kheldians behind some weird Quantum Incarnate foe, I just used the example of the Quantum/Void mechanic because it is a system that is already in place and easily pointed to in order to get my idea across as to what this might function like, only I was hoping it could be expanded upon.
Kheldians would continue to see their normal Quantums/Voids, and if you were a Kheldian Incarnate then you would simply have Incarnate foes added to the mix, not special Quantum Incarnate foes.
Believe me, the last thing I want to happen is to make Kheldians less team friendly, my favorite Hero that I have is a Peace Bringer. 
"All that crap is grey to me, no XP." - Positron 5/15/05 8:36am . . . The world stopped and silence ensued except for the sound of a crying infant off in the distance.
"Everyone needs to chill the hell out." - BackAlleyBrawler 11/13/08 3:26pm . . . Geeks around the world stopped and blinked.
I'm sure all of us here know that You were only referancing the game setting. I was just playing with the idea is all. 
I have been mulling over the whole Incarnate issue for a while now, not really sure what to make of things, since there are so many varied styles of game play that most of the ideas that I came up with only really seemed appealing to one type of game play and not any other.
So I decided to do a Zen-like, empty the glass, and start over approach.
I went back to the very first Incarnate experience I had, which was the Alpha slot. It was elegant in it's simplicity and mechanics. It blended into existing content beautifully, and then to top things off, was tweaked even further to blend into even more lower than level 50 content.
It was in a word: Perfect.
Now, I should probably pretext my next wall of text by coming clear about how i feel about the rest of the Incarnate system after the Alpha slot.
I loathe League play. Nothing the Developers do with the incarnate system will ever get me to play it or like it as long as it involves League play.
Having said that, I want to shift gears and focus on non League incarnate content.
My suggestion is simply to go back to what worked great so far, the Alpha slot progression scheme. I think why it works so great is because it's blended into already existing and proven content, and that content has such a huge variety that everyone can find *something* that they like doing and still progress on the Alpha slot. Whether that be solo play, small team play, or large 8 man steam roller play. It all works, because it all makes progress.
Now, I would like to take a few already existing and underutilized game mechanics and spruce them up for use in Incarnate progression.
I ask myself, why are incarnate powers limited to lv 50 game play, and unavailable when exemplaring to lower levels, even though we can still earn shards while exemplared, those very powers themselves are unavailable to us.
I would have to answer, because that would make us to powerful and trivialize the content we are being exemplared into.
OK, assuming this premise, wasn't the Kheldian AT under a similar premise? That they would be so powerful that they needed some great equalizer added while they were on a team. Hence the addition of Voids and Quantums.
I propose adding something similar, Incarnates are "flagged" in a similar fashion as Kheldians so that they spawn special foes that challenge them more than conventional content does.
I've run my one alt that I bothered getting some Incarnate powers for through normal lv 50 content, tip missions, contact missions, scanner missions, non Incarnate Trials/TFs, etc. And I would have to say that having that extra power does tend to trivialize much of the fights. So far the solution has been to increase the mission difficulty, either by increasing the level of the foes or the "you are equal to X amount of players" values.
If there were foes designed to fight incarnates suddenly appearing in missions where an incarnate was playing, I think the added challenge would be much welcomed, and be a cool new story-wise element added to the game.
If folks are resistant to this idea, perhaps a setting could be added to the difficulty NPC, a new toggle to activate/deactivate incarnate foes. That way folks could have the experience that they desire rather than have it forced on them. Of course whatever bonuses you get from having them show up you would not get, but I think that's a fair trade.
Some rewards for having to deal with these new foes could be:
Badges
Extra Infl and/or prestige
*The ability to earn incarnate salvage
This last point I want to elaborate upon, since it is the very crux of this entire post's suggestion.
So far I've seen folks pleading for alternate means to progress on the incarnate path without having to deal with iTrials. I don't want to go into iTrials here, that's not really the purpose of this thread, the reasons are many, and other threads have elaborated upon them all much better than can be done here.
I wanted to propose this new way that can SUPPLEMENT existing and future means of incarnate progression.
Since this suggestion isn't a specific path, like grinding one specific solo arc over and over, or grinding iTrials over and over, I have decided to call it "The Undefined Path".
Now here's the part where I will just be guessing at, since I'm not a Developer and am not good with numbers, but I will just toss some out to give you an idea, please feel free to ignore the numbers or alter them to a variable that makes more sense, etc.
For each kind of incarnate foe you defeat, there is a small chance it drops an incarnate salvage item, be it salvage, thread, Astral or Empyrean merit, etc. The Devs can adjust the percentage chances on that reward table as they see fit. Ideally adjusted so that you can make steady progression, but not so little as to not be noticeable and not so much as to glut the system. Perhaps a timer per type of drop so that once you get say, one Empyrean merit, the system wont let another one randomly drop for you until X amount of hours passes.
The following list is an off the cuff suggestion on the drop timers and percentage chance:
Empyrean Merit = 20 hour timer/1% chance to drop
Astral Merit = 10 hours/2% chance to drop
Very Rare Salvage = 5 hours/5%
Rare Salvage = 2 hours/5%
Uncommon Salvage = 1 hour/5%
Common Salvage = no timer/1%
Single Thread = 15 Minutes/5%
Keeping in mind, the above timers are just when the system will ALLOW a drop to happen, you would still be at the mercy of the RNG to get that drop, so those items in actual practice will take longer to drop than the listed time values.
That's it for the mechanics side of this suggestion, now I want to shift gears a moment and flesh this out a bit.
I can picture two kinds of threats being sent at incarnates, I will elaborate on each one.
First, I imagine that Emperor Cole will see the rise of Incarnates on Primal Earth to be his biggest threat, and thus create a Counter Incarnate Squad (C.I.S.). Basically super beings (or robots etc) specifically designed to fight incarnates. These would not have varying abilities so much, just tough to fight.
Now for the second type of Incarnate threat:
The one thing I disliked about the Kheldian foe mechanics is that they were always the same foe, there was no trepidation as to what you were fighting or what it could do to you.
I was hoping that some sort of random foe generator could be created to allow for a more random threat variable with each encounter.
I can imagine the Well of Furies to want to test potential incarnates that he will be granting power to. To this end it would empower foes with random abilities and send them after player Incarnates.
Their powers would be randomly selected from a large list of power sets, and special abilities so that every one sent at you will be a foe worth taking note of and taken with some fear and trepidation and sooner or later you will end up fighting a foe that you are very well equipped to deal with or one that just happens to have the right combination of powers to be your worst nemesis.
This last part might be tricky to implement, but I would like to see this system take into account the number of incarnates that are on the team, so that if there is only one incarnate, then one incarnate foe is present, if four incarnates are on the team then four incarnate foes are present, this way a full team of 8 incarnates doesn't completely murder a lone incarnate foe and again trivializes the encounter. One last point, if possible, these special incarnate foes agro on the actual incarnates in the party before non incarnates, in other words, they home in on incarnates first.
Thanks for reading, I hope this sparks some food for thought for future Incarnate content.
"All that crap is grey to me, no XP." - Positron 5/15/05 8:36am . . . The world stopped and silence ensued except for the sound of a crying infant off in the distance.
"Everyone needs to chill the hell out." - BackAlleyBrawler 11/13/08 3:26pm . . . Geeks around the world stopped and blinked.