Kyria_Shirako

Deltoid P. Hamsterlicker.

Fm/SD does that. It's pretty hilarious when you do it during the BAF, too!

This is one of the only things I strongly dislike about the Incarnate trials - The lack of transparency. It's generated a lot of people who have an aversion to Trial content believe they're being screwed over by the participation system rather than just the RNG, but I have absolutely no way of proving this one way or the other. People get screwed by the RNG all the time and that's almost an accepted part of life, but when people get screwed by a hidden, Byzantine system it feels six times as unfair.

And as frustrating as I find that, it can't be one tenth as frustrating as it is for people who haven't had my luck.

Wait until you've got your Fm/SD's softcap on. SD is semi-squishy on the trip up, but the moment you get your defenses to 45%, your Fm/SD will become a god/dess of hilarious and unholy destruction.

If... That means Fire Melee/Shield Defense, then yes, it's absolutely godsdamn awesome. Fire Melee's got good single target and an excellent AoE, and then there's just how awesome SD is on Scrappers.

I actually switched mains from a Blaster because of that combo.

I almost exclusively use maximally levelled IOs, for three reasons.

1) Maximum enhancement benefit.

2) I rarely ever Exemplar; If I want to run sub-50 content I tend to use characters I'm still levelling.

3) (and perhaps more relevant to your query) For the most part there is very little content in the game sub-50 that is so difficult that it requires your full percentages and set bonuses, especially now that you get powers 5 levels above your exemplar level.

That said, if I did develop a serious hankering to exemp at things, I would more than likely use Zombie Man's Exemp Build strategy.

1. Alpha, which is a brilliant bit of mechanical tinkering that had me once again toying with Mids builds on my favorite characters seeing how much juice I could pull out of the thing.

2. Destiny. I wanted to give this to Judgement, but I couldn't; Nothing has changed the survivability curve of my /Shield like Rebirth Radial's regen. And with everyone else, it's still wonderful; my WP brute loves 10s of capped resists, and I'm sure the squishies can't get enough of the mez protection. In incarnate trials I T4 this first, in part because the T3->T4 jump tends to be pretty huge in Destiny.

3. Judgement. Explosions. Massive explosions. Really hyper super massive explosion final attacks. Mechanically it's not the most game-changing thing in the toolbox, but thematically it's the kind of thing I've been internally begging for since hitting 50 - and if you managed to work a Musculature Alpha into your build...

It was harder to order the first three, because they're all wonderful; my last two were a little more clear-cut.

4. Interface. I'm not sure why it gets the good press it does; overall Interface is really badly designed.

Sure, all the other trees have maybe one booby prize tree (Alpha's Nerve; Destiny's Ageless) that is mechanically lackluster and will rarely be taken, but Interface has exactly one side of one tree that's worth getting excited about. Some of you above have, in fact, said as much, using the strength of that one halftree as a supporting argument. Other than Reactive Radial the effects are too weak to really hurt most AVs or do anything significant to trial mobs before Judgements, or even alpha-powered AoEs wipe them out - and the one half-tree that IS good is brokenly good in Rains and Patches, benefiting different powersets with such stark irregularity that I can't imagine that the nerf bat is too far behind to make Interface behave like other procs.

Still, it's better than:

5. Lore. Limiting themes in a game that's all about bringing your own concepts; weak uptimes, lack of renameability if you're not a mastermind, lack of special commands if you're not a mastermind. The pets may have some sting themselves, but overall it's a disappointing waste of potential.

Which is really sad, because Eden feels so damn epic.

Really good teams with lots of Judgements and some level shiftery can actually get away with steamrolling the facilities; it's standard MO with one of the groups I run with. Gets you tons of iXP and doesn't leave the squishies to die repeatedly.

Still, it's not something I'd try to rally a PuG around.

I've had a problem with the varying importance of these messages, too.

Some of them are completely unimportant; I'd be happy if just "War Walker Charging Orbital Lance" stopped appearing, because you see the red circle and that should be warning enough, and even then most buffed/melee types can pretty safely ignore that circle.

By itself, this wouldn't be a problem, and I could just sort of block it out if it didn't hide more important messages - Like the Nova Fist message.

Were it necessary to have a participation mechanic, then above all else it must be transparent. I would tell people exactly what they have to do to be considered 'participatory' by the system. If telling the players what constitutes participation would allow everyone to break the system, then it is a bad system.

Even if they eliminate the Mastermind flaw and various other aberrations from the current system, even if the system by some miracle of analysis was a reasonably fair metric of participation it still will cause egregiously counterproductive behavior just because the one time a player ran around aggroing the entire Training Facility without actually killing anything, or left Brawl on auto, or they stood on one leg and recited the Badger song in League chat over and over was the one time it graced that player with a very rare, and the players have no way of knowing whether or not it was unrelated.

This is more or less why I'm only T3ing Lores on my characters for whom none of the pets are an excitingly perfect fit (which certainly applies to everyone I've started taking through the Incarnate system thus far.) Comparatively speaking T3 is not a lot of work stacked up against a T4, and I wouldn't really be too miffed to have to make another.

I look at it this way - And with some of my non-Mains I even cast this eye towards Empyreal merits:

What the hell could they possibly release, available via astral or empyreal merit, that would be better than higher-tier Incarnate powers?

I don't know the answer to your question; I'm working on getting my first Ion judgement as we speak. But I do know that this is the most awesome name for a thread, or, for that matter, anything short of "Cute and Fuzzy Cockfighting Seizure Monsters."

For me:

1-6 are number keys, but after that I start wrapping around the keyboard.
R is 7, and is often reserved for ranged attacks on melee, or snipes on ranged attackers.
F is 8, and is often one of my movement toggles (e.g. Hover)
V is 9
C is 0

With Alt and Ctrl modifying things to the second and third tray as desired. I find it works well.

So I'm on a team of four players who know each other RL. I'm playing an Ice/Kin Corruptor, and we're doing the Hero Morality mission of the team's Nin/Nin stalker at +1x8. The one where the mission holder's doppelganger comes and fights you.

When we get set up for the doppelganger, we duck into a small office room to filter the spawns through the doorway. I'm still playing with the powers at this point, but I've selected Repel, and this looks like one of the situations where it could be useful to keep enemy spawns out the door. So I turn it on.

Our Dark tanker and stalker are is out in front, stacked up beside the door, I'm right behind them, and our Darkfender is off to the left. The doppelganger arrives, the battle starts, and suddenly... everyone goes flying away from me. Not the enemy, my team.

That's right, the Nin stalker doppelganger had Smoke Bomb, Confused my fluffy butt, and caused my teammates to go flying into the walls of an enclosed space, repeatedly. It turns out neither Dark nor Nin give you Repel protection.

Of course, by the time I'd figured out what the hell was going on, we'd all but wiped. And I couldn't stop giggling about it.