New Incarnate Power Slots

I think we should all just chill out with the new Incarnate slot business, take a minute to reflect, and acknowledge Tyrant as our champion. I mean, damn, I've seen leagues of sixteen fail to kill Marauder. If some of us can't even be smart enough to kill one of Tyrant's minions, how the hell are we supposed to take down Tyrant!?

There was an epic thread in the COH General section full of a bunch of people whining about how hard MoM is. If an ENTIRE LEAGUE OF PEOPLE (my assessment of their competence withheld) can't take down a single pawn that Tyrant moved forward, how would they expect to defeat him? This guy solos Hamidon, for chirs'sake!

More seriously though, I just don't think that we, as players, deserve more Incarnate slots. We have an IO system and access to some seriously awesome Incarnate abilities already, and leagues manage to fail trials besides BAF and Lambda (or are lazy enough to never branch out to new trials, much less figure out that the word "you" has three letters in it) and so I would say that any new Incarnate slots should be withheld from us.

The stipulations? Any new trial after i22 should exclusively grant iXP for the new slots. Only characters who are at least 50+1 should be allowed to join these new trials. BAF and Lambda should only be able to be run once per day per account in order to get people to freaking do something else, get a grasp of how the game works, and prepare themselves for challenges.

Once Primal Earth has proven itself competent enough to take down ONE FREAKING INCARNATE(Tyrant) and his minions, without failing, maybe then we should be given access to new Incarnate powers. If I was the Well though, I would take about 40 of our players in my pocket and move on to a new dimension less populated by <remove potentially inflammatory description at this point.>

Uhmm.. not to burst your little bubble there Twoheaded, but uhmm.. I was part of a 4 man Keyes.
Oh, and we did it faster than most full leagues.

So.. maybe the players you team up with are not competent enough, but most of the players on Guardian have no issues what so ever with these trails.

For all you who say proof or it didn't happen, we made a demorecord of it.

Ah, the smell of burning elitism in the morning.

So far, my favorite is TPN. I haven't done Underground yet, and the one time I was on a Keyes trial, the trial failed due to people not understanding basic instructions, and the leader running off in bizarre directions and demanding everyone form on him.

The Underground is honestly a lot of fun for me. It's a great dungeon crawl and while a couple points can be a bit irritating, it's not really that bad. It's easily got the best atmosphere of any iTrial except maybe MoM, but that one moves so fast it's hard to appreciate any particular area as you're frantically trying to make sure the phase succeeds. The underground, however, has this wonderful gradual transition as you move from the sharp clean lines of the Praetorian underground sewer/train/etc system into this smooth curvy organic Geiger-esque hive of living plants and corrupted IDF & monsters, ending with the fight against the big bad Avatar.

Really I'm hoping we get some Praetorian Eden style zone that uses some of those art assets.

IMHO, we have Lambda, BAF, Keyes, UG, TPN, MoM, and in a few days DD.
Those are 7 trails, just for 4 powers most of us have unlocked already on our main 5 toons.

So unless the new powers are unlocked using the same ixp, why do we get so many new trails?
On the other hand, why would they allow us to unlock the new powers without progressing the story line?

I understand they like to show us they work hard by pumping out new content and trials, but the reason that the new trials are mostly being neglected, is that they don't really bring anything new to the table for us.
I bet that if each trial would unlock a power, drop salvage for that power, people would do all the trails more even instead of farming BAF and Lambda.
I even was wrong with thinking MoM would be the new Incarnate farm.
It's very easy, and you get an Empy each time you complete, yet people still do BAF and Lambda... cause they are more comfortable doing that, because they have been doing that for a while now.

The vitriol because some people dare to be new to something or playing a character not fully ioed and just turned 50 aside...

There is little incentive to do the new trials as pointed out aside from experiencing new content. The rewards aren't that much improved over LAM and BAF. And if you've got a brand new 50 still on common IOs and SOs you basically can't help a league on anything besides these two. Even with one level shift you're more of a liability.

And the nature of trials means that the vast majority of them are PUGs, so you are kind of taking what you can get and hoping that everyone follows directions. If people don't follow directions on MoM, TPN, UG, and to a lesser extent Keyes you are guarunteed failure. While with LAM and BAF if people are just kind of doing their own thing a few competent people can pull it off regardless of people not following directions.

Finally, I've been on ~5 failed trials with 3 +3s and 5 +1s at various levels of advancement to +3. I've also been through every trial multiple times save DD, and learning as I go through each of them. I'd say that the number of glaringly incompetent VIPs is rather small and sometimes you just have to understand that mistakes happen and people are learning.

It depends on your server too. Victory has a really nice crew that does trials regularly and we run most of them. TPN and MoM are great trials for doing repeatedly, TPN because it's really pretty easy and nabs you a min. of 60 threads but even then completing it isn't that bad. As well, it's -very- easy to get a MoTPN badge within one or two runs, which is nice for the extra uncommons and random rare. That and TPN and MoM have no cool down from emp -> Astral and it's a lot nicer for building up that emp cache in case you don't get that

Plus we've got Dark Astoria to help folks running solo and small teams to help move things along a little faster.

But being open about being a newbie tends to help too, letting folks know you're not level shifted or even if you have anything crafted. I've seen several times where groups will be deciding on a trial and folks pipping up about "I Need physical" experience helps choose.

Without spoiling much, Promethius has a whole new batch of dialog in Issue 22 that discusses a level of power beyond that of an Incarnate, but he has made it quite clear that he will not provide you with this power until after we defeat Battalion, whose appearance is to follow after we defeat Praetoria. I loathe to think that this "ascended" state would be represented merely as part of the upper echelon of the current Incarnate system, because that would hint at our next batch of upgrades being years down the line.

As for the Incarnate trials - I have never really been a fan of their design. I feel that there are too many barriers for casual players to participate and that they would have been better implemented as zone events.

There are empty power slots, just sitting there. MOCKING me. We deserve more than being mocked. You deserve more I mean. Thats right, the people have spoken. Give us more.