Cyber_naut

You mention 'so many blues rain down', and while that is certainly true solo, its not nearly as true on a large team (although on a large team you usually will have buffers). So as this guy says he wants to run this toon on teams, does your build require popping lots of blues? I'm curious because I've got a fm/sd too and wondering if I'm overkilling endurance reductions. But even on my build, I need a blue every once in a while when dropping fast paced aoe on everything.

Ah, so what happened to the rares from the last version, were they dropped or just not revealed yet?

Also, I remember seeing other abilities like procs that could be added to powers in the last beta forums, was that for higher incarnate levels that were leaked or someone just imagining things?

I completely agree with you in that it seems sadly imbalanced that something so valuable (and in many cases necessary) in defeating the games biggest challenges, -reg, is only available to a select few builds.

On the plus side, from what I read about the old incarnate stuff, before it was yanked, one of the powers you could add appeared to be -reg. So if that option is still present in the new incarnate system, it will open up this resource to everyone and when people are building teams, maybe your non rad at won't lose his or her spot on the task force or GM team.

This is a great point. And it brings up what most players want - the ABILITY to reach the top ranks of superheroes/supervillains. Most players don't want to play a game as robin sidekicked to batman, they want to be iron man. It shouldn't be easy to solo av's or heroes, and it isn't. And as others have noted, those who can do it, aren't breaking the game via ridiculous rewards for the effort put in, the reward is pretty much the accomplishment and nothing more.

So to answer the original question, imo, eb's, avs and gms should all be soloable given enough effort, but it should be pretty difficult, and it is. Those who don't want to solo them, don't have to. It's a win/win situation. I've soloed av's and I still prefer to team, so it's not like the current situation is going to destroy teaming. And with the coming incarnate abilities, the lower level av's (and while technically incarnates will be lvl 50, incarnate levels are basically additional levels of power) will be easier to defeat, but I'm pretty confident the new content will provide higher level av's and other threats to provide greater challenge - in fact the devs have pretty much said as much.

I agree with you on all points. But on the merit point, I think the guy you quoted was rightly concerned with the low merit rewards being handed out recently (see cathedral of pain trial). If this task force requires incarnates, and is very difficult, then time to complete should not be the only consideration in determining merit rewards.

I think theres a big difference between needing a special energy weapon vs. needing to be at a certain level of power. These task forces are, or should be, more about needing the game's 'supermen' and 'hulks' vs the game's 'antman's' and 'wasps', rather than just bring anything but make sure they're armed with the anti-praetorian death rays.

I have some characters that can already stand toe to toe with statesman and recluse, it wouldn't take too much from the incarnate system for these characters to flat out beat them. And the devs have pretty much stated that what we've already seen of the incarnate system wasn't 'epic' enough, which is why they pulled it, and we only saw the first of ten levels. So I see no reason to believe they're talking about only being perceived as more powerful and not actually more powerful than game lore characters.

Having said that, if you're correct in your guess that this is just wordplay, and that the incarnate system won't actually allow characters to eclipse game characters in terms of actual gameplay ability, then the dev was being incredibly deceitful and it's a lame *** move and cheesy marketing gimmick that will lose them customers.

Exactly. There are many ridiculous scenes in all the movies, but fonzi suddenly turning into tarzan and employing a monkey army was WAY beyond any of them and just plain dumb. And I don't have a problem with the movie being about aliens and I don't have a problem with the actor who played mutt. There were other scenes that were pretty ridiculous, the fridge scene for one, but the monkey one was, again, just plain dumb.

Another poster suggested it's the same as the ark scene where it was melting off peoples faces, but it's just not. The arc scene is different in that we accept that the supernatural exists in these movies, and the arc is explained to have supernatural powers, so when its opened and starts turning nazis into butter, its obviously a hard scene to accept in the real world but it works in a movie where you accept the supernatural. But when a kid greaser suddenly has the agility of tarzan, for no explainable reason even inside a movie where we accept the supernatural, and can command an army of monkies, again with no explanation as to how even inside of a movie where we accept the supernatural, then you go from 'hard to believe' to just plain dumb.

And I agree that lucas is a creative genius overall, hell, he created some of the best movies of all time in star wars and indiana jones. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have some really bad ideas, that can be negated with the right collaborators (see empire strikes back).

The ridiculous use of monkeys as an attack force was implied when i refered to them as an 'army'... lol. Ya, there is ridiculous, which can be acceptable up to a point if the rest of the movie is good, then there is just plain stupid ridiculous, which is what that scene was.

Because it's by FAR the most ridiculous, impossible and just plain dumb looking scene in any of the movies. Some greaser kid suddenly learns how to swing from vines through a ******* jungle, gathers an army of monkeys, then somehow manages to catch up to a speeding caravan of motor vehicles. There are pleny of other ridiculous scenes in that particular movie, and in temple of doom as well, but this scene is by far the worst of them.

And yeah there are other ridiculous scenes including improbably meal selections and unlikely survivals from falls, but they just don't compare to fonzi turning into tarzan, imo. It took the stupid meter that used to go to ten, and made it go to eleven.

One of lucas' dumb ideas that required filtering, lol...

Setting the reward at a pitiful 21 merits for a tf that requires 3 teams and careful team planning is severely reducing the number of potential participants, due to not wanting to go through the PITA of just setting one up. I play this game a lot, and I've gotton on this TF once since release, and had one other opportunity. The incentives to play this TF are clearly ridiculously too low.

When I see their recent moves in praetoria and in tip mishes, I'm not so sure that they do understand that. Why on gods green earth did devouring earth need a buff vs. defense based toons? I'm not certain on malta, but they seem to have turned my defense based toons into highly heated butter armor as well.

Every other group you run into at lvl 50 on a io'd out toon should NOT make you feel like a lvl 3 blaster with a damage aura.

I think the two replies you got should answer your questions about what softcap means.

But I think this shows a misconception about SD, and defense in general, in that it creates some sort of invulnerable character or an I win button. Defense only becomes really effective at or near the softcap, and is usually only achievable late game or by eating insps. Even then, some stuff will get past your defense, and when most of your mitigation is defense, you drop pretty quickly.

I hope when the devs skim threads like these they realize they're reading posts primarily from some of their better players, who know how to maximize their abilities, and don't feel they need to cripple defense. After playing through praetoria and tip mishes, and also seeing how they under-reward in TF's like the CoP, it seems they are balancing the game by looking at what the top end players are doing, and imo, that's a bad stategy.

Not true at all on a shield scrapper.

Elec/SD or Fire/SD with fire or mu epic powers get my vote for best aoe scrappers. Other combos are in the same neighborhood, but they fall behind in either their ability to hold aggro or their survivability. And I know this is about aoe, but sometimes you want some single target damage, and spines is painfully defficient there.

And a fire/sd or elec/sd will keep up with or surpass any farming brute.