Think of everything fun

XP is basically currency that is automatically spent. I won't dispute that it works better. Indeed, if the XP was all that was needed for Incarnate abilities I'd probably enjoy the system a good deal more. But adding different forms of required XP tied to specific activities serves the same purpose as adding any other required currency/item tied to specific activities.

Hehehe I understand your analogy but BAD example. I can take my wand to the Hollows and in about 10 minutes cure 20 LOST. I can stand face to face with a 7 level Lost boss I see there and never have him move a muscle to attack me because I am a level 13 or 14 by then. I don't have to run like a mad woman every 15-20 seconds away from an auto killing electrical storm between curing each one while they attempt to dislodge my cute head for the attempt.

Now to the OP. I understand your pain but listen ... just run the farms. Almost all of the available Adv IXP from a successful or failed Magisterium trial is wrapped up in Phase one. Go kill 250 IDF about 5 times and your Hybrid slot is over.. and you never once have to run from Tyrant. It will get better and easier as people learn the ropes and devise their own strategies. Soon like everything else it will be easy..

Case in point KEYES. okay so they did nerf the pulse a bit. The reason they succeed now unlike when the trial first started is people learned to GRAB glowies and rn up and slot 6 terminals before Anti Matter ever arrived. At that point you don't even need to taunt him just go fill the rest of them holes and move to the next reactor.

TPN .. as long as you don't want that final badge and the MO badge don't send a soul outside to deal with Seers or maelstorm just run from building to building taking out terminals and TADA you win!

UG ... PAY attention and let the tank/brute or whatever pull the Lichen healed Warwalker into the corner so only one Lichen is in range, keep killing that lichen and lay on the DPS to the Warwalker. Part 2... for goodness sake before you enter the trial ASK and make sure 3,4 or 5 people have tier 3 or better tier 4 clarion with the 120 second duration. Then make sure they have it available when you hit the final chamber and .. you win.

It may take a bit for more people to conquer the Magi but we will. Till then throw on some overalls and farm your way to hybrid

XP drops from everything you defeat - salvage can be regulated to drop only off certain enemies, or at certain points of a task.

Actually, that's been my experience so far. With VERY thorough briefings for teams, people just aren't getting the hang of it, and both of the only two runs of it I've done on live have gotten stuck with Tyrant at about 30% health with about 7 minutes to go ... and it never budges from there.

On the other hand, after 7 minutes of practice, both leagues were doing a lot better. It was too late to pull it off, but people were learning when to move, how far to move, to have the tanks pull him 20' or so as soon as the lightning hits so that melee can keep beating on him. People on that 2nd league scoffed, going into it, "I don't need greens, I don't need awakens, we have so much DPS on this team we'll steamroll Tyrant." The first dozen lightning strikes, all you could see were fields of dead scrappers.

On the gripping hand, though, I was spiking wells as fast as they were spawning, and I have Level Shift displayed in the attribute monitor windoid, and I never, ever, ever saw it go above the +3 I went in with. I missed Arbiter Hawk's explanation of that on the beta forums, but if we're all supposed to be at 50+(9-n) where n is the number of wells up, it's bugged. No two ways about it.

(The bug may be showing up earlier than that, too. My Level Shift was all over the map during the Black Swan fight, including several times it dropped to 50 minus 3, even sometimes showing 50-3 while my incarnate abilities weren't greyed out. Something's odd about this level shift mechanism, I think maybe.)

Edited to add: Just ran two more runs, both successes, bringing me to 2 for 4 on live. It really is like a dance; people have to learn to fight right up until the lightning patches arrive, move just barely far enough to get out of them when they do, resume fighting as fast as possible so as not to waste any bonus buffs from the wells.

But the wells are bugged. But it's inconsistent. Sometimes I did get my +9 buff, sometimes I got nothing. I couldn't spot a pattern to it, either.

6/7 Successes

Not quite the 3/4 ratio you are claiming. I like that it is not an absolute cakewalk.

And FYI these were all PUGs with 2-3 friends on league max. If you are running it and notice there is not enough debuff etc... speak up. At least in this trial every AT can feel like they are contributing something. Don't blame the trial for faulty league leadership...which will improve as it gets ran more and more. I remember when BAF first hit.. people failed failed failed failed...I think the first week it was out I did 10-12 runs with maybe 2-3 successes.

But hey if you wanna quit..quit. Makes no sense for someone to subscribe to a game they do not enjoy. I would like to add though that your experiences with the Mag...are not universal and many people enjoy it as well as Hybrid. On Freedom there were numerous Pocket D's with a lot of Mags running as well as all the other itrials....in my book it's a good addition to the itrial experience.

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

It's not a "false rumor".... Energizing Ion was leading that trial and can confirm what happened. Lady Azrael was the second player.

ETA: And yes, I bugged it in-game. I believe Az did, too.

DODGE!!

Snow Globe and I shared a good conversation about this topic. I am of the opinion that the Trials stand against everything positive that has made City of Heroes superior in ways its competition has yet to duplicate by introducing new content barriers with specific requirements and various ranks of difficulty where as difficulty was once largely even across the board even if the challenges themselves were unique.

It also doesn't help that their upgraded mooks (averted with the bosses in most cases) featured therein are nothing but palette swaps with no visual queues for their enhanced status (although the new Pandora's Box story arc addresses this problem.)

I feel the development time spent on Incarnate Trials should have been invested in generating more repeatable open-world events and raids to promote the game's spirit of cooperation and to reserve the bulk of the story as a set of task forces (Neo DA did the latter example well, only with Story Arcs instead of TFs to provide soloing capability.)

Raiding in general typically leads to the development of tiers of power grinding where you ultimately just do raids to get better raid gear so you can do more raids, ad infinitum. I don't know about the rest of the community, but the trials have always been a means to an end for me - getting Incarnate Powers to bring back with me into the standard game.

Furthermore, when enough tiers are developed in the aforementioned example, a system of haves and have-nots becomes evident as all the veteran raiders are too busy doing the latest and greatest raid while it becomes almost impossible for someone new to break into the raiding scene seeing as how they're usually restricted to starting at square one. While CoH is not even remotely close to this territory yet, this is affecting that third Super Hero MMO which just came out a year and a half ago right now.

That's untrue as stated, particularly in regards to the various types that have been added. Also, the devs control both types of drop and could engineer it so that you received XP awards at certain mission points but not from individual mobs as well as make the individual mobs drop the various forms of currency/items.

And it's irrelevant to the point that creating further types of both XP and currency/items serves the same purpose, in any case.

While Shubbie's usual hyperbole deserves being laughed at, your apparent misunderstanding of averages makes the nerd in me want to punch you through the Internet. Why are you doing that to me why why why why why

It's the only trial that unlocks Hybid at the moment. The next trials added will also unlock Hybrid.

That's the way it works. You do the first lot of trials to unlock the first lot of slots, the second lot to unlock the second lot of slots, and so on. Not bad design at all. It has already been demonstrated that if you give players a free choice they will simply grind the easiest trial and never do anything else.

As for Hybrid, since it sucks anyway, you can always put it off and go do something else.

Why go through all the trouble of more cooldown timers and percentages of health when you could just spread the iXP out better. The only problem as I see it is that almost all the iXP is at the front. I got 17% on the first part of the trial. After beating it, I had gotten about 20% total. That means the rest of the trial got me 3%. We fought more than 3 AV's, so that tells me that I'm not even getting 1% iXP for an AV.

As far as all the discussion about difficulty, I have to agree with those that are familiar with this tune. Every iTrial that has been released is "too hard" and the poor pugs will never be able to complete it. I've run the full trial twice, first with 23 people, then 14. Both were successful. In fact, neither had any issues at all. We just plowed through the thing. And yes, both teams were pugs.

I really put the Mag on the same level as BAF. A few sacks of HP to go through, and that's about it. The Mag has a couple of tricks, but only a couple. As far as the more recent iTrials, The Mag is pretty straight forward. In fact, I'd think The Mag would be run right alongside the BAF and Lambda once more people figure it out. There are more enemies to defeat up front in The Mag versus the BAF, but The Mag doesn't have the forced 5 minute prisoner escape. But, that's just my thought about it.

They reduced the strength of the [Antimatter Pulse] AND reduced the required number of terminals per reactor from ten to six AND reduced the [Disintegrate] damage AND changed it from a complete end drain if you survived being [Disintegrate]d to a partial drain.

It was all of those changes combined that made Keyes so much less painful and tedious IMO. Increasing the chances of Rare/Vrare at the end of Keyes too was just gravy

(and I had multiple MoKeyes from the old Keyes, I knew how the trial worked and I still found it painful and tedious.)

Black Swan is draining our power by design. It may be too much sometimes, not sure the full intent. I have had Fire Shield on my blaster grayed out and unusable during the Black Swan fight (just one time, but I was tripping when I saw it).

I believe you got threads. I believe you were in the hospital when the trial ended. I do not believe the two are related as I have been in the hospital when the trial ended and got a rare. I will admit my one counter-example does not prove that being in the hospital when the trial ends may cause a problem, but it suggests your conclusion may not be accurate.

I do not think this will ever be a long-term problem. There will be times right after new content is released where this is a concern, but 2 to 4 weeks after that new content is out, a regular rotation that includes earlier trials will always prevail.

Our alt-heavy nature, the merit stores, and the fact that even with the new incarnate tiers we don't out-level them, virtually ensures that even veteran trialers will have a steady interest in the early raids as well as new ones.

But that level of power destroys the standard game - we were already massively powerful at 50 - the Incarnate powers make any pre-Incarnaet content trivial
The Incarnate powers are designed for Incanrate content - being able to use them in non-Incarnate content is just a neat little bonus to let us show just how far above it we now are.

/em marks another box off of his bingo sheet

Blood Widow Ricki * Tide Shifter * T-34 * Opposite Reaction * Shaolin Midnight * ChernobylCheerleader

Entropy Legion * Hyperion Force * Hero Heights

I'm shocked as hell! No one knew this would happen. It's such a strange occurance . . .




















Too much on the sarcasm?

ehhhh, the devs have NEVER said this.

They need to keep challenging us, but at the same time show how much more power we now have - and the easiest way to do that is to let us use Incarnate powers on non-Incarnate content and totally trash everything that gets in our way, and keep the challenges for the Trials.
Incanrate powers weren't designed for non-Incanrate content, because non-Incarnate content was never designed for Incarnate powers.
For example, when the devs made the STF, they never thought that Dr. Aeon's clones would be wiped out with one multi-Judgement strike, or that the team would have Lore pets to use against the Arachnos Patrons, or that we'd be able to fight Recluse at 50+1.

His 75% failure rate to my 85% success rate...

Then again.... his was a complete guess that 75% of leagues were failing as there is no way to tell what percentages of leagues are failing this...only your own failures/successes.

Bottom line... new trials fail much more when they are released...and the success rates climb as the players learn to adapt to mechanics etc. My advice... form a better league yourself...find more competent teammates...or just wait a few weeks until more people can run it successfully.

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

The devs have never said one way or the other if they care if we use incarnate abilities in non-incarnate content.

Anything else is opinion and conjecture.

If you know of other wise point to a link where they say so in text or video.

Under other circumstances, I would agree with you... But the fact that it happened to BOTH of us and no one else in the league, in spite of how active I know the two of us had been during the trial as a whole, makes me think something went wrong beyond a random glitch.

If they cared, they'd have made them available only for Incarnate content