What are you expecting for a solo Incarnate path?

The pace of unlocking things with iTrials is something I can stand to do with multiple characters.

I'm hoping the solo version retains the speed while adding the fun element back in of being able to do small group/solo content amongst friends, and avoiding some of the iTrial gimmicks.

Quite true.

This Clarion thing - I just thought that maybe I'm doing the Incarnate thing wrong. I'm 'done' for the time bring with my Incarnate toon as he's got a tier 3 or 4 in all of his slots. I'm happy with what he can now do. I don't have Clarion, tjough, and I was thinking 'pff, they want everyone to ignore everything and get Clarion?' but then I remembered that you can craft multiple abilities and swap them round in your slots. So I guess I could grind to get Clarion and just use it for the UG.

Is that what the devs want us to do? Get more than one ability for slots? Are we suuposed to be collecting ALL the incarnate abilities?

If they continue adding a new required ability to their trials, that will blow.

Eco

Quote:

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."

I'm guessing, but I think that it's a little easier to write iTrials than regular content because of the Incarnate abilities, in a way.

One of the reasons our regular content is so easy is because you have to make it soloable for an empathy/electricity defender, which can make the same content a snooze fest for, say a fire/fire scrapper (unless they voluntarily dial up the difficulty).

But when writing content for 24 Incarnates, you can assume they are at all of the buff caps, side step all that with irresistable abilities, and assume that they have access to all of the Incarnate Abilities of the appropriate tier.

"There's at least 8 Incarnates in this trial with 3 level shifts; we can assume somebody has Incandescence, and that somebody else has Rebirth. So it's a slam dunk that the League has mobility for getting around death patches and healing, as well as massive AoE from Judgement."

And any team that doesn't have the right abilities can just go slot them and try again.

The endgame isn't like the 1-50 content, where if you are defeated, it's because you nodded off at the keyboard or pushed beyond your luck, it's probably expected and intended that you will be defeated several times per run, at least for your first several runs.

One would hope you don't have to.

Taking the original released powers for each Incarnate Ability (4 of each), then it's reasonable to assume that, on average, 25% of players on a League will have a given ability at one Tier or another.

You can then design content based around "semi-optimal choices", by which I mean that if the League acts as a cohesive unit (by utilising rolling Destiny buffs, say) then as a designer you can say "at any given time, the hypothetical League running this trial will have these levels of protection". That then sets your bare minimum difficulty level. Next up is "mostly optimal choices" which sets the requirements for additional perks (Astral merits), which are granted when the League demonstrates the ability to act cohesively, and finally should come "tailored optimal choices" wherein the League utilises precisely the correct abilities for the task at hand (such as Clarion on the UG trial), which then sets your requirements for actual overall success (to get your lovely Emyrean merits).

The thing is, the trials reward cohesive action, and they severely punish independent behaviour (well, with the possible exception of the BAF). This is not a bad design choice in itself. The potentially "bad" choice is to have set the size of Leagues so high that unless everyone knows what they're doing, it can become an exercise in herding cats.

However, to a certain extent, the iTrials can be successfully run by any group of players who know what they are doing - which can be as simple as having run the trial in question a few times, even with vastly different groups - and that plays to the PuG nature of CoH as a whole, but the negative side of it is that there existed so few trials in the game prior to the iTrials that people have become used to a very binary experience when playing the game: team wins, or team needs more dakka before team wins.

The trials, however, have several points of failure (or objectives which, if not met, cause failure later on), which can't be overcome simply with more firepower. This distinction is what makes the iTrials such a point of controversy, really.

I personally think that the developers made the right choice with the design of iTrials, overall, but until the player base as a whole becomes used to running them as cohesive units, they will be more difficult than they need to be.

On the other hand, I think that solo- and single-team-content for incarnates is absolutely essential. I would hope that it serves as a middle-ground in terms of design philosophy, a way to point players towards the idea that making more-optimal choices improves the odds of success.

That may be how it works, but I am reasonably certain that's not the intent.

I think Incarnates in this game are supposed to work similarly to the characters in another NCSoft game, where you have access to a huge array of different abilities, but can only 'set' a certain number to be accessible during a mission.

So before a mission, you can decide who is going to tank, who is dps, who is mezzing, etc.

Very strategic, and I like it in principle.