What are you expecting for a solo Incarnate path?

Do you not see the contradiction in your statement. "There are as many who prefer the league path" but "it will be the read less traveled".

I believe it was mentioned that the turnstile will work while in missions as well. Single best change since the buffs buff IMO.

I like this idea.

Contradictory yet true.

People will do things they don't like doing in this game, and then come here to complain about it.

Many people are playing through the iTrials and hating every second because they feel that is the only way to progress. These people need to be rescued before the burn out and leave VIP status altogether.

Many people prefer teaming, strategy and the controlled chaos of a league, but will (possibly begrudgingly) do team content instead if it is the faster ixp.

And do not forget that Trials require a 'critical mass' of players, or even specific players. Too few players online at once actively attempting to form leagues, and even if you love and prefer Leagues, you can't get onto one. If the usual League captain is off in DA, and every other member of the league is milling around in the RWZ or pocket D waiting for him to sound the call, the league might not form at all.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

Clown: quoting my post as QQNerdrage and then having the audacity to try to bring me around to your confused way of thinking, then to assume you are able to dictate to me what my expectations are? Be silent, all are better served.

Here, let me spell out for you why putting raids in this game and then balancing rewards around them is a bad idea.

The trials, as you state, are around 30min long. Achieving objectives nets you a nice EMP merit once per day, a piece of random salvage per run, and a good chunk of your incarnate xp (which is retarded, btw) to unlock access to your incarnate powers.

Now, let's put this in perspective. From my estimation, a soloable path to Incarnation should be conservatively three different contacts each with their own mission arc from 3-8 missions for each contact. At best, there should be 1 to 3 objectives in each arc, depending on if the contact it solo or team oriented. Each mission should take approx 30 min or so with a competent team of 5-8 or should take a little longer, around 45 min, solo. Now, each ARC should reward the player with EMP merit upon completion of the final mission. The Astral Merits should drop upon completion of each mission objective, and incarnate salvage should be accessible as a reward for the completion of each team mission or eery second solo mission. XP unlocking of your INC slots should proceed at the same value per mob presented in trials. EMP merits are awarded at the rate of one every twelve hours, and the missions are scaled at a minimum of 52. While I realize that makes them absurdly difficult for SO balanced toons, I think we can all agree we're through pretending the game is balanced for SO's. Itrials certainly are not.

Now, where are our apologists going to have heartache with this?

For some bizarre and almost stockholme syndrome reason, people seem to have allowed their perceptions to be skewed to a misunderstanding of the risk vs reward equation with regard to team vs raid content as it pertains to the pre existing dynamic of this game. So, once again, as it's been said before, but shouted down for some strange reason I am beginning to be forced to equate to mental illness:

TEAMING IS HARDER THAN ITRIALS. TEAMING REQUIRES YOU TO ACTUALLY KNOW YOUR ROLE AND AT, AND BE COMPETENT AT BOTH. TEAMING TAKES LONGER THAN ITRIALS. TEAMING IS A GREATER RISK THAN ITRIALS. TEAMING, THEREFORE SHOULD OFFER SIMILAR REWARDS TO ITRIALS.

Now, that said, I'm sure the apologists and delusionals, as my detractor here decided to label me in his confusion, will erupt with all manner of bizarre excuses, but the above statement seems pretty straightforward and inarguable to me. This game is not constructed like the games our developers and writers are attempting to emulate with this raid focus. It's combat, risk vs reward dynamic and most aspects of gameplay are centered around TEAMING not raiding.

Realistically, an Itrial, I'm thinking of the BAF, takes about 16 minutes. Takes about an equal amount of time to get one together, and it's so idiot proof it's very nearly impossible to fail. The rewards listed above, I think, are far, far too generous for the minimal amount of effort and risk involved. If our Itrials were gated or had a lockout timer, I'm sure I would feel differently about it. But they don't. They can be performed back to back ad nausea forever. There are effortless, very nearly, and very, very absurdly lucrative.

Given that team oriented content, especially for a larger team, is going to be much more difficult, I don't see why rewards for team content or soloable content should be in ANY fashion less than offered in the Itrials and have yet to hear a satisfactory reason to the contrary. This 'Well, raid should always offer greater rewards' is wrongheaded and backwards thinking in the dynamic of this, our game after seven years of focus on team and solo play.

I am actually honestly curious, all hostility aside, to hear what people think about this. Are we going to pretend that team content is easier than the Itrials? Are we going to stick to the broken risk vs reward ratio that dictates that teaming is somehow a lesser effort than these trials? What is it I'm missing here that everyone seems to just blindly accept? After reading somedumbname's post that quoted mine, I see that he or she has already fallen into that trap of unlogic and basically erroneous thinking. NOT balanced... how? I believe I've adequately covered the reasons that it actually IS balanced according to my own perception of what balance is, and has been in this game for the last seven years.

No, I don't think we are. Scaling "solo" content to a level that none of my solo characters can fight at is not a solution to any problem. The problem, at least from my perspective, is that there isn't anything I can do by myself that can net me a realistic form of Incarnate progression. Scaling everything at 52 does nothing, because it still leaves me without anything THAT I CAN DO by myself that can net me a realistic form of Incarnate progression.

I'd rather this take longer than be harder.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That's a good point, Sam, but I'm pretty sure the devs aren't balancing ANY of the Incarnate content for SO's as an account has to be VIP to even have access to it, and IOd toons are now arguably more common than SO'd ones. So maybe a solution is scaling the soloable content to 50 or 51 and setting the bar a little higher for the team oriented contact?

Honestly, I'd say let us pick our own difficulty and scale speed of progression to it. That way, as people gain more Incarnate powers and more level shifts, they'll be able to go up against harder foes and gain Incarnate progression faster, but there would still be a curve. If you're talking about fighting level 52 enemies, I'm sure a 50(+3) Incarnate would laugh at their adorable attempts at offence, but a level 50 character just starting out with no Incarnate powers is going to die and die a lot.

When we talk about Incarnate content, we're really not talking about one set difficulty or one set level, but we are (or should be) talking about progressive difficulty. For reference, look at level 45-50 content. You don't start off fighting level 50 enemies as soon as you hit up Unai Kemen, right? You start off fighting level 45 enemies who then turn 46 as you level up, then 47 and so on to 50. That's what I want out of the Incarnate system, ideally. Even if it's not automatic, it's something I'll aim to do with my own difficulty settings, provided there's a point.

If you set Incarnate content too low to cater to those who have no actual Incarnate powers and have that be ALL of it, you're making it way too easy even for those same people, because they WILL grow stronger. By contrast, if you set it too high, you make the barrier of entry almost impossible, negating the "solo" part and making people have to run Trials or non-Incarnate content in search of level shifts before they can compete... And you STILL end up making it too easy when they level past that. The truth of the matter is Incarnate content needs some way to scale to player power, either manually via difficulty settings or automatically based on what the player has slotted in their Incarnate abilities and how many level shifts the player has.

More specifically, the thing with higher-level enemies is you essentially just have to slot more accuracy. That, really, is what it comes down to. There are other problems with them, but that's essentially it - if your enemies are much higher level than you, you just need a host more accuracy, or to-hit buffs. What that means in turn is suddenly the Accuracy Alpha becomes damn near mandatory, when I honestly don't want it. I prefer the Recharge and Endurance Reduction ones.

---

At the end of the day, the POINT of solo Incarnate content is that it's easier, hence why it doesn't require 20 people. I don't feel any particular need for Incarnate content to be gated by difficulty. Gating it by time is perfectly fine, provided progress is at least visible, which it isn't with Shards right now. With Shards, I may get one per day, or I may not. That's pretty much the polar opposite of visible. So long a I can see I'm making progress and I don't have to take weeks upon weeks for even the smallest thing... I'm fine with grinding missions. It's how I got to level 50. Difficulty isn't something I look for in my gameplay, simply put.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I really hope they make this post before i22 goes live, so we don't have a repeat of the Trapdoor fiasco.

I suppose that's my essential problem with it. Everyone seems to have an obsession with keeping these idiotic raids alive. WHY? They're NOT a good idea for the long term health of the game, people burn out on them too fast for that. Gating solo or team content behind some kind of artificial time system is an absolute NO GO for me. I can't stand to be stultified by the an artificial mechanic like that. It's one of the primary reasons I don't play raiding games at all. What scares me is that they're pushing all the raid/Store crap so hard because they're trying to milk as much money out of it as they can before the kill the game later next year. I know that's just paranoia talking, but every game I've seen go F2P dies within a year/year and a half and that just scares the hell out of me for this one. So seeing boneheaded decisions like that one that are sure death in the long run be pursued with almost fanatic zeal makes me think they're trying to get as much as they can in the short term before they're told to pull the plug. It's the only explanation I can think of given even a cursory analysis of the game market and larger MMO's that go F2P in the western world.

As far as our current problems, Sam, I would have to be stupid to discount your usual level headed and well thought out reply to my various rants and irritations. I DO see your point, and have to acknowledge it as valid, but I am also going to stand by my own. These solo and team contacts need to be worthwhile and offer a reward system that isn't cripplingly slow or stupid. Time locking out the merits to something as long as 7 days is also an absolute NO GO. Hell, locking the EMP merits out at all I think is an absolute NO GO. While I realize that people are going to argue with that (the same people, I'm sure, that argue with players wanted a kheld revamp on the grounds that they MUST just want an "I win" button), I can't really find any validity to a counter argument whose basic tenant is still just 'well, raids have to give out better rewards than anything because...well..because I said so, and that's just the way it is". That's doesn't even make little boy sense. I know a six year old able to grasp risk vs reward better than that.

What was the trapdoor fiasco?

trapdoor was an AV that was necessary to defeat in order to unlock the first slot of the Incarnate progression,the Alpha slot. It's part of Mender Ramiel's arc. Trapdoor was balanced against IOs (though they claimed otherwise) and was unkillable to a large number of toons. Therefore, a great deal of frustration and nerdfury rightfully found it's way to these forums. What good was incarnate progression if you couldn't even DO it? What's comical about that almost is that they went ahead with the raid thing anyway, even though it was built on the same philosophy.

This is pure BS. When people were whining about this I soloed him on an Elec Blaster with no secondary or pool powers, using just minor damage attacks to defeat him, with only SOs of 2x acc and 3x DMG. 0% RES, 0% DEF, no heals, not even a high damage attack.

Trapdoor is slightly harder than your average enemy just because he's an EB. People not understanding how to deal with an EB is not "devs balancing around IOs."

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Okay. I have heard both sides of this argument, and been on both sides. I could NOT solo him on my rad/rad corr, but soloed him with ease on my Claws/WP brute, which I found hilarious. I had imagined it would be the other way around, but my brute's inherent regen outhealed the damage from the lava we both stood in.

I'm not going to say one way or another, so I'll instead change my wording. THE PERCEPTION was that Trapdoor had been balanced against IO's instead of SO's. Please don't fling your hate at me, I didn't program him, or populate the boards.

You do know that the Trials are the core endgame content and are never going to end, don't you?
We've already got 4 that are live, 2 more in beta, 1 more coming with the next Issue, strong hints of an 8th one for fighting Tyrant, and then there's ther whole Coming Storm to deal with - the endgame system has no end, so there's no end to the Trials.

They will be - but because they're easier to do than the Trials, they'll give slower progress than the the Trials.
The Trials take longer to start, need more organization, and have harder enemies than solo content - so they give the best rewards.

Every time "gate by time" comes up, I harken back to basic levelling speed in the 1-50 game. Granted, certain people seem able to 50 in a day, but I remember back in I1 when the eponymous Samuel Tow first got to level 50. Asking an M-name citizen revealed that I had taken right around 750 hours to get him there, and I honestly did not feel like my time had been wasted. It's faster these days, with my newer 50s typically scoring right around 200-300 hours, and I'm not exactly in a rush.

How this relates to solo Incarnate progress is I have no problem with said progress taking time if that's intended to be the gating mechanic. I'm a patient guy. The problem with solo Incarnates NOW, which is to say just defeating enemies and hoping for Shard drops, is that it's in no way realistic as a form of progress. In fact, Black Scorpion out-and-out said this, that shard drops from enemies were meant to supplement raiding, not replace it. As such, what I want out of a solo Incarnate game is a means to progress through it that's intended and which is not punitive. I don't expect raid-speed progression, and that's just fine. To compare to levelling up, I can get on an ITF in my upper 30s and gain about two levels in a couple of hours, a feat which would take me something like three to four days on my own. And yet I choose to do it on my own partly because I prefer the game that way and partly because I don't want to just fly through the levels to the level cap.

What I want out of the solo Incarnate content is enough of it that I have something to do and enough progress that I don't feel like I'm wasting my time. Furthermore, what I want is progression that I can SEE as it's happening. What this means is I don't want a chance for a very rare drop, I want lots of little drops that resemble filling up an experience bar. I want to see my progress creep along as I'm playing, because that's the best kind of positive reinforcement I can think of.

Speaking more broadly, I don't really ask the world of solo content. I want it to be fun and I want it to progress me in a meaningful way. That's about it. Well, and that I CAN PLAY IT! That's why I don't mind fairly easier Incarnate content that takes fairly longer to build stuff up through. If you're interested in harder, faster progression that's still not raid-centric, that's when I'd suggest incorporating the difficulty slider into the speed of progression, such that those who want to "level" faster can take on tougher enemies while I don't have to.

Trapdoor is an interesting example, because he's actually not that hard as a boss. He's more of a gimmick fight. Yes, occasionally he could be dangerous if he hit you with Total Focus, but for the most part, Trapdoor is only slightly tougher than, say, a Crey Power Tank boss or an energy Paragon Protector. In fact, with the tactic where you'd draw him into the hallway thus preventing him from spawning bifurcations (since patched to be impossible), Trapdoor became an easy fight.

Now that Trapdoor has to be fought with his bifurcations in place, the fight becomes less difficult and more annoying, as you're forced to look for his summons. What makes it annoying isn't killing them - they're about minion strength and don't attack, if I remember correctly - but rather finding them, since they could appear anywhere and you have no way of knowing how many there are or where they've appeared. Trapdoor himself is not that bad.

Speaking of fights, I've fought him... Let's see... I fought him with a Fire/Fire Blaster who essentially burst-damaged him to death within the span of around 10 seconds, I've fought him with a SS/Inv Brute who beat him down proper, I've fought him with an Axe/Shield Brute who beat him by "cheating" before the hallway tactic was closed down and I've fought him, I think, with a DB/Will Scrapper who beat him without much difficulty.

Personally, I find the most difficult fight in that arc to be the Honoree in the next mission over. As an enemy, he's much tougher to take down. I don't know if he has more hit points, but he's more resistant, he has status effects, he seems to hit harder and I believe he has Unstoppable, to boot. I've died to the Honoree almost every time I've fought him, having to resurrect at least once, whereas I don't recall dying to Trapdoor but once, if that.

That said, neither EB is impossible to take down solo, or at least hasn't been to my experience. They're tough, yes, but I beat them and I was using just Common Inventions. No sets, no set bonuses, no Hamidon enhancements, no temp powers. As I said back in I19 Beta - if that's how difficult Incarnate content is supposed to be, then I'm perfectly fine with it. Enemies were my level, they didn't cheat and the fights were mostly decent. Sure, I had to fight some of the game's tougher eneimes and, of course, there were EBs left and right, but that more or less comes with the territory. At no point, however, was I expected to be min/maxed and at no point were the odds truly stacked against me. I had to use a few tricks, use a few inspirations and take a few punches to the face, but that arc was actually very, very good. I'd run it again if I could.

Ideally, I want to see Incarnate content be about on the level of difficulty of Ramiel, with the Honoree as about the upper boundary of where difficulty should peak, at least in terms of starting out content before I'm expected to have Incarnate powers.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

God help us.

See, there's the part I have issue with. Sure the raid mobs are harder if you're fighting them solo, but you aren't. It isn't designed that way, so that's a strawman argument to me. And team content is easier than raid content? According to who, exactly? I have a much, MUCH harder time getting a team together in the time I have to play than getting an itrial together. They're not even comparable.

No, the raid thing is balanced around the philosophy that some people will have strong IO builds and Incarnate powers. If you're not one of them you get to mooch off the people who are. Also, if there is a new episode of Mythbusters on you can plant your fingers on the number keys and watch it and mooch off the people who are paying attention.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

This is actually why I maintain that the solo game is almost always harder than the team game in terms of straight-up difficulty - because in the team game, there's usually someone else to do your job for you.

To be fair, while easier, the team game is significantly more work, as it involves herding cats, much waiting for teams to assemble and dealing with the above-mentioned leechers. However, even though team tasks are designed to be harder, they end up being easier than many solo tasks where a solo player simply ends up not having an easy way out of a situation.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.