Eva Destruction

Ah, I see. So you don't get threads as rewards on the raids, they're the Shard conversion method to advance?

People who don't like Praetoria have been waiting since August, and there is no indication that the wait will be over any time soon.

And how fast do the threads drop? In other words, how many times do they expect us to grind the new raids?

If it makes you feel any better Sam, I understand how you feel. I had a similar reaction when I read that intro paragraph about Tyrant and his cosmic power.

And every single response you have made to someone who expressed dissatisfaction or criticism of the end game raids or Incarnate system has essentially come down to "Shut up, I like it, so shut up."

Considering that people report some of the slots will have level shifts that can only be used on Incarnate Trials, this end game seems to be heading down exactly the same "raid until you have enough lewt to do the next raid" path.

You can't forget the Well of the Furies anymore, since issue 19 and even more so issue 20 is going to make sure you don't, no matter how much you may want to. So there go your alien invaders, Nazi ubermensch, and Leviathan. Probably your ravager and sleeping dark gods too.

Well, judging from what the EU sneak peakers are reporting of the Lambda Sector preview, the good news is more slots might open up after all, the bad news is "if you don't like team content, you should do team content because we want you to like team content."

Issue 18 also reintroduced the CoP, which is group content. Before the Alpha slot was pulled, Task Forces were the most efficient way to both unlock and fill the slot.

Issue 17 included the Positron Task Force revamp, which is team content.

As for issues focused on grouping:
Issue 15 was a mini-issue, and also included some AE improvements. AE is solo-friendly.
Issue 12 included both the ITF and the soloable Midnight Squad unlock arc and improvements to the Hollows.
Issue 10 had quite a bit of team content, with the LGTF, Mothership raids and zone invasions, but also included four soloable arcs.
Issue 9 had the STF and villain Hami, but Inventions allowed solo progress.

Issue 20 brings us team content, teaming improvements, and soloers get....an easier way to get around redside.

A mini-issue. It never pretended to be anything but. Issue 20 promised to be epic.

I agree with Venture...quite a bit lately actually....and this worries me.

A-ha! I can disagree with Venture. I think we also need more to do in the 30-40 range, especially for villains.

I'd say we need another Task Force specifically geared to the 30s more. Trials I could take or leave, since the ones we have are basically shorter TFs with objectives beyond "beat up all the bad guys until you get to the biggest baddest guy, then beat him up," sometimes with a timer. Newer TFs play more like trials than old-school TFs, only without the timer.

They also make it sound like one of the raids will let villains do more than just help heroes save the world again. Yay for co-op content that remembers we're playing thieves, murderers and all-around not-nice people.

Um, villains smell and Recluse needs a back wax? .

In the past, those players could wait until the next issue. Don't like i7's villain focus? I8 was all heroes. Don't care about inventions? Next issue we'll wrap up the Rikti storyline. And if you get bored of Rikti, in the issue after that they barely appear at all. The precedent has been "if you don't like it, don't worry, we know not everybody likes the same things and we'll come up with something else you might like in a few months."

The last three issues have been "don't like Praetoria? Well we like Praetoria and we think you should like it too." And the last two issues? "Don't like raids and task forces? Well you can farm up a ton of Shards, we guess, but it'll have to be a lot of Shards because we like raids and task forces and we think you should like them too."

The Joker has a very distinct personality. The lack of a cohesive backstory only adds to that. Tyrant has about as much personality as a Doombot.

Yeah, well myself and players like me would like something else new to do in this game than fight the same guy three issues in a row so far. So there.

(Preemptively bolded before the inevitable "the old content isn't going anywhere" or "go play another game." I like this game, I don't like Praetoria, I'm not alone, and such an unprecedented focus on one story line that many people don't like alienates those people.)

Lately they've been falling under the umbrella of "mechanics." Labeling them as content would imply that the story was important enough not to be just a justification for the mechanics.

Not if you don't like raids and TFs. Not everyone does.

At least there's this.

And this.

The rest? Praetoria, Well of the Furies, Praetoria, Well of the Furies....and no mention of the next Incarnate slot at all. Yawn. Can we wrap up this evil goatee universe and move on to something cool?

Oh, and this is another thing I'm getting tired of: the global threat that forces villains to help save the world so it'll still be there for them to take over later, whenever that is. While taking absolutely no steps to make this "later" come sooner.

Seriously, how hard would it be to add side "take Cole's stuff" or "take advantage of the distraction to take heroes' stuff" objectives to the Praetorian task forces? They could award badges, but completing them would summon enemy reinforcements, or buff some of the enemies, or otherwise make the main objective more difficult.

It doesn't have to be new, it just has to be more interesting than "another evil Statesman and his jumped-up Stormtroopers." Someone mentioned they wouldn't mind beating up more 5th. I wouldn't mind beating up more 5th. I wouldn't want to do it five issues in a row, or even two, but the 5th are interesting enough for me not to mind revisiting every once in a while. Preatoria isn't that interesting, and they've already had two issues dedicated to them. I like the Rikti, but I wouldn't have wanted i11 to also be about them. People complained about the "all Arachnos, all Longbow, all the time" nature of CoV, what makes you think people won't complain about all Preatoria, all the time?

That might have made sense if beating him up had been the beginning of the Incarnate path. "Yo Well, I beat up your champion, and by extension, you. Now make me awesome!" As it is, the Incarnate content is making it abundantly clear we wouldn't stand a chance against him, and by extension the Well, on our own. Making a deal with the devil is a much safer bet if you know you can kick the devil's butt if need be, incredibly stupid if you can't.

Well yeah, except for brutally and immediately putting down anyone who disagreed with him. So there wasn't any crime because jaywalking was punishable by death. Latveria has been depicted as a pretty nice place to live, if you didn't mind the total lack of personal freedom.

Tyrant isn't nearly as cool as DOOM anyway.

And, you know, us.

Ok, how about my schoolyard argument: He started it. There had to have been other things he did to justify a Resistance, not because of it, because very few people would risk their perfect utopian lives over some dude's wife.

It still won't explain why he's trying to wipe us off the face of the earth. Did he ask us for help with his Hamidon problem and "we" said no? Does he want to eliminate us to give his people an uber-Hamidonless place to live? He could have asked. The population of Praetorian Earth is way smaller than ours, I'm sure they could fit, and if they couldn't I'm sure Portal Corp has access to lots of nice, primitive, relatively uninhabited and thus Hamidon-free dimensions. Did Statesman imply he was involved in an inappropriate relationship with his granddaughter?

Any of the above would pretty much have to be a Nemesis automaton, and frankly I much prefer the "he's just a power-hungry megalomaniac" explanation.

They tried that, sort of, with the Loyalist Responsibility storyline. It just showed that not all of Tyrant's supporters are evil, some of them are just deluded. Tyrant himself is still revealed as a megalomaniacal mustache-twirler at the end.

They're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that someone who is trying to wipe out all super-powered beings in another dimension that never did anything to him until he started it is somehow "right." Well, except for Malta.

This would of course be a kamikaze attack. But they would rez, so it's ok.

How do you know that? Maybe we've just connected to more dimensions than any other alternative Earth we know of. If we were truly the only dimension to connect to all these others, why would the Rikti try to use other dimensions as jumping points to get around their inability to go back and forth from our dimension to theirs directly?

Well we had some pretty good Lovecraftian potential in Merulina and the Leviathan and the Coralax, but now that ties into the shoehorning of our powers and origins too, so there goes that idea.

I don't recall Captain America or Indiana Jones making names for themselves by beating up creepy psychic Borg chicks or brainwashed prisoners or reappropriated janitor bots. Maybe I missed that episode.

I will admit those shoulder-mounted rocket launchers the IDF have are freakin' sweet, and the group as a mish-mash of enemies who can mess you up in a variety of nasty ways is a nice challenge, but their generic stormtroopers have about as much personality as the generic Arachnos stormtroopers you outgrow around level 30.

The same thing that's not to like about a crazed fangirl who's the apparent champion of everything the devs do launching an invasion of inane one-liners to enslave the entire forum?

Cole is a bland, generic megalomaniacal overlord threatening the world for reasons to be explained later, made even worse by his being another alternate Statesman.

They are hired by a Longbow guy in Mako's patron arc. They're more than just a bunch of mercenary assassins though. There is a ritualistic, cult aspect to the KoA, that is only barely explored in a few one-shot missions.

That's what I thought too, I think the use of the word "zone" in the preview is misleading. I do think it has something to do with Praetoria since everything else lately seems to, and the "rift portals" seem to heavily imply that.

It does look like the kind of map that would contain a lot of "maps within a map," which should be neat.