Eva Destruction

This is the part I have more of a problem with than the "you should at least try it before you decide you don't like it" aspect of requiring some form of participation. I'll try it because I try everything. Having to repeat it over and over just turns it into a grind, no matter how much I might like it initially.

So if I hate the BAF but I like Lambda Sector, I'm not entitled to BAF rewards, ever? Even though the next level of trials, which might be something I like, will be balanced around my having BAF rewards?

Furthermore, if I like doing Lambda Sector occasionally, but don't feel like doing it right now, I should just log off my Incarnate, because I can't make any significant progress any other way?

Me too. As long as there were starting options that weren't Praetorian in addition to later unlocks. Even if it was just your generic Longbow/PPD/Vanguard/Arachnos pets, it would acknowledge that there was a game before Praetoria. If some other options were unlocked with existing badges (Rularuu, Council, Banished Pantheon, CoT, Carnies) it would give people even more starting options since you could collect the badges ahead of time. Unlockies based on Accomplishment badges would also make a great deal of sense for a slot called Lore.

Shield Charge has "Very Long" recharge. It's 90 seconds. So yeah, meaningless.

I didn't pick it. The devs picked it for me three years later.

Considering the fuss some people make if the devs slightly alter their chosen hairstyle, let alone the mass outrage about the initial APP changes, I don't see how anyone could be so obtuse about the problems this would cause.

All I will say about the Destiny slot is that I hope the persistent buff visual is subtle, or preferably non-existent. There's enough persistent glowy action-obscuring crap being thrown around already on teams without adding more. The activation visual should be noticeable but the buff effect shouldn't be. That said, I can easily treat it like Leadership. I'm not coordinating the team into a better defensive position, I'm not pointing out the targets' weak spots so you can do more damage, I'm running Maneuvers and Assault. I do sometimes RP Vengeance but that's because I played too much Diablo
The wording of things like "Notice of the Well" and "Favor of the Well" as well as requiring specific tasks to unlock the powers suggests they're being granted. Which is more grating than if you were just taking them. Sucking up to the boss for a raise isn't the same as legitimately earning that raise, or stating that you will quit if you don't get one.
You're not a "special snowflake" because that has become a derogatory term that implies a sense of entitlement. To this I respond: you are special. This game's much-lauded character creation system was designed to make you special. Your costume is purely aesthetic and the bio field is 1000 characters long to help you establish your specialness. You got weapon and power customization to make you even more special. You are not part of an undifferentiated mass. You are not part of the Incarnate herd. You are an Incarnate. It should make you feel even more special, not less.

Judgement should be fun. Some of my characters are perfectly suited to such powers, others would have to do a bit more justifying to fit them into their concepts. I have quite a few Natural origin characters, and for them such powers can't be handwaved away as coming from anything but an outside source. Ion and Void seem like the most conceptually flexible ones and will probably be my "well, if nothing else fits...." fallback choices. They're not ideal for everyone but they'll do. I'll probably use the fire one a lot simply because I seem to have quite a few characters with fire powers, and quite a few who don't have fire powers but whose backstories are linked to my main, who does. I won't have much use for Cryonic, conceptually.

Lore: Ugh. Just ugh. In terms of gameplay it'll fill any team I'm on with even more idiotic lag-causing whole-room aggroing pets. If they come with MM-style controls they'll just be idiotic and lag-causing. I honestly don't understand people's unconditional love of pets. I understand wanting a damaging pet if you're soloing a low-damage AT, or a pet to take the heat off you if you're squishy, and of course MMs need them, but tell me, why are your fat-*** spider pets that are blocking a doorway so your five teammates can't get in helping your team, and by extension you, in any way? How are those fire imps that just chased something across the map and aggrod three spawns that killed the Blaster who was contributing far more damage than they were useful?

I guess I already answered how I'll feel about everyone having Lore pets. Them being all the same means I won't immediately know who to complain about when one of them does something stupid.

Judgement: As a Blaster player, annihilating everything is my job. As a Brute player, keeping that Blaster safe so they can annihilate everything is part of my job. We already have a lot of players who feel annihilating everything is more important than any other role their chosen AT and powersets can play. Giving everybody the ability to annihilate everything will only encourage "soloing on teams" and further marginalize damage-focused ATs.

It also makes my 16-second recharge on Full Auto seem a little meh. What's the point in tweaking my build for massive, fast-recharging AoE damage when the Incarnate system lets everyone have it, and indeed assumes everyone will have it? Hey guys, I can do massive damage every spawn even though I'm squishy as hell....oh, never mind. Some Tanker already annihilated most of this spawn. And the soft-capped Defender is going to annihilate the next one.

I don't care what my fellow heroes and villains do. I see the game as my comic book title, with other heroes and villains existing in the world, but only becoming relevant to my title when we do a "crossover" and team up. I ignore their actions because the game requires it. I beat up Hro'Dtohz and saved the world. I can't have done that if I acknowledge that you did it too.

I strongly object to the idea that my powers aren't mine. I more strongly object to the ret-con that my powers were never mine. I even more strongly object to the idea that my powers come from something no one with a shred of sense would want to associate themselves with. Part of it is that I'm "chaotic alignment" in real life, and that carries over into my philosophy toward the game. I want my characters to be free, and beholden to no one, even the ones who are more inclined to respect law and order than freedom (although admittedly most of my characters who fit that description are "lawful evil" villains. My personal bias is showing.)

Tying yourself to an insane sentient entity is beyond idiotic, and playing unintelligent characters has never appealed to me. Some of them might be arrogant enough to make the proverbial deal with the devil believing they will come out on top, and some may be impulsive enough to stick their head in the crazy entity without bothering to find out what it's all about (yeah, I did Ramiel's arc, all they heard was "blah blah blah, Well, blah blah blah power, blah blah, beat up this guy, but watch out for blah blah...." and they were already off to beat up that guy) but the majority of them are savvy enough to avoid doing anything that stupid.

Yes, I do believe character diversity is an important part of the game. When there is only one way to do something, it's boring. When everyone is the same, it's boring. I have no investment in a generic drone, no matter how powerful they might be. I played WoW for three months and never gave a rat's patootie about my Blood Elf Rogue. I can't even remember his name. It was all about the next power, the next item upgrade, the next skill. That's part of why I only played for three months. I played this game for three weeks, saw how much easier a time many other powersets and ATs were having with stuff I struggled with, and never once thought of rerolling. I've never regretted choosing AR/Fire at character creation when I had no idea how the game worked and picked powersets that sounded cool.

Nobody looks like me, and nobody plays like me, and nobody looks or plays like anyone else. When I invite a Scrapper to my team, I don't know if they'll cut a bloody swath of destruction through everything in their path or hang back and protect the squishies. If I invite a Corruptor, I don't know if they will play predominatly as offense, or team support, or somewhere in the middle. Your Brute could be built for insane damage or insane survivability. It's awesome.

Making everyone more the same can only take away from that. I liked the Alpha slot because it gave you more flexibility in differentiating yourself, and building for your own playstyle. If you wanted to do more damage you could choose Musculature or Spiritual. If you wanted to be more survivable you could take Cardiac to run more toggles. Interface is also great for that (which has absolutely nothing to do with allowing lethal damage-reliant characters to have a -res proc, nope, nothing to see here, move along). Destiny too, to an extent, since I'm guessing many people will choose the buff that their own character finds most useful, and those that don't are also making a statement about how they want to treat their character. The AoE nature of the buff does diminish that a bit by giving everyone a team support role, but not as much as Judgement or Lore.

The Lore slot is especially problematic because it blatantly and unapologetically ties our characters to the storyline that is stripping us of our individuality. And that was a very long post.

The Shadow Shard reflections don't want those praetorian losers sitting at their lunch table.

Ok, but how will this negate or diminish the current slots' inextricable tie to Praetoria?

No, but the meta rationale is. It's unnecessarily tying gameplay mechanics to a specific storyline. Again.

One might expect a slot called "lore" to be tied to the game world somehow, and I'm not complaining that it is, just that it's tied to this one specific and pretty shallow part of the world that ultimately is saying "those Oranbegan ruins you explored? That century-old Nemesis plot you uncovered? Those things don't matter." It's driving home the point that you're not earning those powers, you're receiving them as a reward for sucking up to the Well.

You should. Not. Have. To. There is no excuse for making you choose between skipping a potential gameplay advantage and accepting a story element you dislike.

But Praetorians are so uber powerful, so it should make you feel powerful that they are your pets.

I can see why they don't allow for a fully customizable NPC pet, like your sidekick suggestion seems to imply. I don't see why the pet is Praetorian, except that the devs love them and want us to love them too. Frankly, tying a slot called Lore to Praetoria is just dismissive of all the actual Lore that came before, and dismissive of everything else we've done before.

I can see several problems with this idea (and no, heroes having to participate in genocide isn't one of them.) but it's better than what we're getting by a magnitude of a million.

Probably because these people's interests haven't been catered to for a very long time.

*Glares at the lack of AE improvements.*

Yeah, we're aware of it. We didn't like the concept when the Origin of Power arc was introduced, but there was less complaining because it could be handwaved away as the ramblings of people who didn't really know what they were talking about. Now it's become an integral part of lore, and can no longer be handwaved away, since everything going forward is based on it.

It was a bad idea then, and the writers should have listened to all the people who pointed out why it was bad, instead of making it worse.

It's only an AV in the instanced mission, which means it scales down to an EB when solo. It's not an easy EB but it's doable.

Because I think the devs are starting to take the view that many players take: the story is just an excuse to punch things in the face, and isn't as important as the mechanics because people are just going to click past it anyway. It feels like it's being slapped on as an afterthought, as a bone to people who actually care why they're punching stuff in the face. At the same time, I think they're grossly underestimating the standards of the people who do read this stuff. Every time someone posts something like "oh, stupid stuff happens in comics all the time, so it's ok" I cringe, because I fear the devs are listening to them.

It's easier that way. It's much much easier to write for a protagonist you know than one you don't, so they make assumptions and force player characters to become the characters they want to write for.

Honest question and not trying to start an argument, but how do you see them doing this? The Well, Praetoria and the Incarnate powers are being presented as inextricably linked. You can't get the powers without connecting to the well through the Praetorians.

And a more important question is, what makes you think they will? They have yet to remove any of the other silly unnecessary story explanations for gameplay elements, in fact they expand upon them even after being told by the people who critically think about these things beyond stating "it's awesome," "it sucks" or "I don't care." Powerset proliferation didn't need a story explanation, and yet it got one, which was then expanded on. The origins didn't need any more of an in-game explanation than the character creation screen gives you, and yet they were expanded on. The medical teleportation system didn't need any more explanation than "we appropriated Rikti tech to bring heroes back from the brink of death," and yet it got its own arc. What's next? A new story arc explaining how we can change our costumes so fast?

Datamining will tell them that players are flocking to Praetorian pets in droves, either because they don't care about the backstory or RP element or consider the power upgrade worth it, or just because everybody else is doing it. They will be seen as fine. It's notoriously hard to get the devs to change anything once they've decided it's fine.

At least until they retcon it into a Praetorian/Well of the Furies plot.

Oh wait, since the Well is responsible for superpowers....then no. There is no story in this game outside of Praetoria.

It's starting to look a lot like that one Infected in RV.

Nemesis is Marcus Cole from the future.

It is very relevant to people who don't like raids. It demonstrates a "If you don't like the raids, you should do the raids, because we really want you to like the raids" approach on the devs' part that is unprecedented in this game and worrying for its future direction.

You're imperfect, I'm superior, only I know what's best for the world, all will bow down before DOOM! Er, wait Tyrant.

Yes, ripping off the most obvious and shallow characterisation of Doom is the easiest way to create a generic megalomaniacal dictator.

They have more or less the same objective if you break it all down to "rule/eat the world" or "profit." Their motives are very different. We don't know Tyrant's.

Game canon creates the world that spawns many of our characters. It is an integral part of them, even if they don't directly reference it. You may be create your characters out of a vacuum and send them out to stab "some guy" in the face, but I created my Scrapper out of Striga Isle, and sent her out to stab the Council, and later the 5th in the face. I have no interest in the character created in a vacuum.

It'll make it unnecessary for Incarnates, but not entirely pointless. It'll still allow people who don't want to raid to get their very rare Alpha. It'll still hand out double merits. It'll still hand out a chunk of XP to people who aren't 50. It'll still make it easier to find a team for those task forces nobody ever wants to do (some of them for very good reason....and the WST will also make more people aware of how much these task forces, which help set up the foundation of the game world, are in desperate need of a touch-up.)

I actually like the idea of the WST when it's not necessary to do it in order to earn anything. It removes the "hurry up, I have to do this 13 more times by Sunday" grind mentality and makes the WST more of a suggestion. "If you want good rewards, check out this task force you might not have done in a while." It becomes a carrot rather than a stick.

Yep, you can use your Praetorian pet anywhere, apparently.

Why must the pet be Praetorian? Why not a more generic pet? Or better, a generic pet with multiple models to choose from, like the buffing pets from the vet rewards? Oh right, never mind. Hail Emperor Cole, future overlord of the multiverse.

That'll be issue 23: You go into the Shadow Shard, drink the water, and become Marcus Cole!

Because the only person who can ultimately take down Marcus Cole is, of course, Marcus Cole. Or 48 of them, as the case may be.

I agree with the decision to include an end-game. I'm one of the people who wanted one. I just don't agree with the decision to follow other games' models for this game's end-game, when those end-game models are so often cited as one reason a lot of people stick with this game.

My biggest hope now is that at some point Marcus Cole becomes Generic209348 because a fairly major character named Marcus Cole existed in a very well known sci-fi series long before this game was a glimmer in Jack's eye.

And GG is possibly right and the forums implode because of it.

Weren't we at some point told we'd be getting at least two free new costume sets every issue?

Ding ding ding! We have a....I was gonna say "winner" but no, I'd have to say this would be a new low. It can only be followed up by Issue 22: [charactername], Marcus Cole is your father.

Um, yes, because a new shiny is the answer to complaints about the current already-dragged-out-far-too-long storyline. Not that I'd complain about base building upgrades, but one has nothing to do with the other.

Something cool = Rularuu or Banished Pantheon or Shiva.

No, it took increasing apathy on the part of the users, without whom user-generated content doesn't work, to shut me up on that. And new shinies that I can't earn there without repeating maybe two or three arcs over and over.

In a thread about the announcement.

And yet, these people are being berated for complaining about the lack of solo stuff in an i20 overview thread. How is i19's content related?

Me, I want good, level 30-50 content that doesn't require teams, so i19 didn't give me that either.

Content that doesn't require teams, duh. We didn't get it, obviously, so um, surprise surprise, somebody got nothing they wanted in an update their subscription helps pay for, they're going to complain.

Then what exactly is the point? Why not just allow conversion of Shards to XP without adding another type of currency?

Unless something is planned to directly award Threads somewhere down the line.