A worrying realization from Prometheus..(spoilerish)

I will agree here, the current 5 slots of the Incarnate system have kind of been dragging on for what, almost two years now?

The problem with CoH is they can't just bring out another set of trials due to the distinct lack of 'gear progression' in the game. They can't simple knock together some armor and weapon models with better stats and throw them in for people to grind for because that just doesn't work in CoH.

However two years is quite a long time to have a cap on the endgame, especially when the other 5 slots are visible in the Incarnate interface. You now run into the problem where simple changing currency is an incredibly unpopular choice because the game already has far too many (Reward Merits, Alignment Merits, Astral/Empyrean Merits, Incarnate Shards, Incarnate threads, the old Alpha only useable salvage from level 50 taskforces and trials, the Notes of the well only useable with alpha slot and then the newer Incarnate salvage for everything else) but people have been stuck at a plateau for long enough that they've horded all the things they need or simple stopped bothering with the iTrials.

Throwing in unlockable costumes and emotes really doesn't bring people back, the people who want them resent having to force being made to run the iTrials to get them (I just couldn't be bothered) and the people hording stuff don't went to spend the merits on unlocking it. I will always stand by the belief that putting in the Ascenscion costume sets and the emotes was a stupid idea by the devs.

Now I can see the design philosphy is that you should have more than one power for each Incarnate slot, you should have Barrier and...the other one which gives you Status Resistance (if only for the Underground trial...), you should have lots of Lore pets. That is fine in theory but most people are a 'one and done' kind of thing, they get their chose abilities and then never bother with it again.

Hitting the military facility at Lambda Sector weakens the loyalist forces eniough to let us operate more freely in Paretoria, adn opens the way for the following Trials, inlcuding the Keyes Island Trial, where we capture the reactors to prevent the loyalists from having a power source for their invasion portals.

Both of those are very important to the Incarnate storyline - discovering Tyrant's secret and exposing the lies of the loyalists to the people are major plot points.

See, this storyline stuff is interesting, but I just never get it when running a trial because of all the chaos.

I wish there were player arc versions of the trials for this exact reason.

And this is why I like the new Dark Astoria content more than all the iTrials combined.

Before Lambda is completed we waltzed right in to the BAF and Neutropolis with no issue, and after Lambda it doesn't stop the thousands of IDF that show up in the trials following it. So, no, it really didn't give us any more freedom to operate from what I see.

As for portals, the Tin Mage TF sees players trash the one in Neutropolis and there's no further incursions after that.

With no portals, power or military hub, Cole's forces operate as strong as ever, if not stronger for the inclusion the the Olympian Guard.


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I wouldn't blame the CoX writers so much as the genre of comic book writing overall. There's an inescapable escalation of power(and this is painfully even more obvious in many animes) that goes down the same path. It's not an upsetting pace 8 years in IMO, but it's not unexpected either. The reboots of a number of DC and Marvel titles and the number reimaginations seem to be the only sketchy solutions so far.

Well, there are actually a couple of changes based on important plot points from the 1-20 GR content.
The first is the disappearance of the War Walkers - in GR, these were going to be the centerpiece of Tyrant's strategy to exterminate both the heroes of Primal Earth and the Resistance - and they show up as bosses in normal mobs on the Admiral Sutter, Tin Mage and Apex TFs, and in the BAF and Lambda - but after we strike against the loyalist military at Lambda Sector, there's a big drop in the amount of War Walkers we run into - in the following Keyes Trial, they only appear in one phase as part of Anti-Matter's recovery strategy, and then after that, there are only 2 of them on the UG Trial as major bosses, followed by none at all on TPN or MoM - with TPN and MoM also showing a big drop in the amount of rank and file warworks too, which would be logical, as those come after the Keyes Trial, where the loyalists lose control of the site where the portable generators that power the Clockwork are made.
The second plot point from GR is Tyrant's reverse regarding Project: Olympian - he wasn't happy with it during Neuron's arc, and the Olympian Guard aren't seen on the earlier Trials - they only seem to turn up as the number of War Walkers decline, which appears to show that Tyrant has either changed his mind about Project: Olympian, or that we've forced his hand because of the loss of the War Walkers as the centerpiece of his strategy, which the loyalist invasion plans estimated would end the war within a week.

While Tyrant might have kept some warworks in resevre for an emergency or for some kind of last stand, the story progress of the TFs and Trials dealing with the Praetorian war seem to show a pretty clear decline and then almost total collapse of the robot section of the loyalist army, based on our actions and achievments during our fight to liberate Praetoria.

I agree with DJ Zero - he definitely fits the bill of an interdimensional being of benevolence.

Television? Considering it DOES have a praetorian counterpart (H.D.), I doubt it considering all TV does is interfere with those who watch it.

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

Originally Posted by Venture I'd never use a nuke in a superhero universe. You nuke a city, you kill 1.5 million people minus one. The last guy not only gets superpowers from the explosion, but ones that let him survive a nuke...and wow, is he torqued off