UberGuy

But this is a non-argument, because solo/small-team content is allowed to contain AVs throughout the rest of the game.

If there were no Incarnate trials, I think this might have something to it. But there are, so I don't think this is the case. I just don't think they're creating that kind of design dichotomy between the two.

We have that mechanism in force in DA. Tsoo that used to be bosses are minions. That doesn't mean there are no Tsoo bosses. That's where this "down ranking" idea doesn't hold water at all. There are still threats to us as Incarnates. They are simply Incarnate-grade threats.

If some of these EBs really, truly aren't supposed to be as great a threat to us as an AV, that's fine. That scenario exists in the pre-incarnate game, too. There are foes who are only EBs, ever. I don't buy that the story suggests that every named "boss" (by game convention, not CoH rank) in Dark Astoria makes sense to be that wimpy.

Look at it this way: The standard game has bosses, EBs and AVs. Let's say an EB is 5x as strong as a boss, and an AV is 10x as strong as an EB. (The exact numbers don't actually matter, bear with me.) There are bosses in DA. Why is it that the most strong anyone in DA has managed to become is 5x stronger than a boss? If people who would be AVs are only EBs, why aren't the strongest foes under EB either 10x weaker (down-shifted EBs) or 50x weaker (downshifted bosses) than an EB? Why are there an bosses in DA at all?

The answer is that these foes are not EBs because the devs are scaling it as if we'd become that more powerful.

"Zombies" was unclear. DA always had zombies in it. I didn't realize you meant an invasion. If it had an invasion, I'd agree that's a bug.

The Echo zones still have their standard spawns that appeared in them when they were normal zones. So there are still zombies in Echo: DA ... they're just BP ones.

You'd be mistaken. The perspective shift is that you are, for many functional purposes, level 53. It would be that you can summon immensely powerful allies from sheer willpower. It would be that your character can cast a wide area nuke, no matter what their AT. It would be that you can have immense defense and DR buffs, be extremely well protected from mez, have boundless endurance, or Empathy-level regeneration buffs, not just for you but nearby allies, no matter what your AT.

Those are quite explicitly the mechanics representation of being an Incarnate, and those are just the ones we have so far. More are coming.

Remember, in Mender Ramiel's arc, your future self fights AVs. Not EBs. Not bosses. AVs.

All I see here is wishful interpretation on your part. No dev statement anywhere backs up this interpretation of DA's content.

Re-read what I said. The bigger your AoE is, the worse this compares to a standard proc. For a 10-target attack, your absolute maximum average works out to a 10% proc rate, even if your single-target PPM suggests a 100% activation rate, and even if you hit 10 targets every time you use the power.

If the recharge on the power is shorter than would go off 100% of the time in a single-target attack, it gets worse. An average of one target per activation is the absolute top performance.

You can't use catalysts on anything but ATEs. It does increase the proc rate on those.

I don't see it that way. To me this is a non-advantage, because I never build characters with that consideration. Also, you cannot boost SBEs with Enhancement boosters. On this count, I would never, ever pay "real money" for these sets.

It's vaguely possible I would consider some of the procs.

Honestly, the only one we've come up with that I consider is the Gaussian's, which doesn't exist yet from the store as far as I know. And that's only if it works like we're speculating.

Bear in mind that SBE damage procs appear to suck horribly compared to the standard ones when slotted in AoEs. Based on our admittedly limited understanding of them so far, it appears that the absolute best average proc rate is one target per attack activation. That's assumes it's slotted in something with a base recharge >= PPM/60 and that you saturate the attack's target cap every time. If you do neither of those things you average less than one proc per activation.

That's pay to lose, IMO.

Not unless you were logged out for 30+ minutes. Why would being logged out for 30+ minutes and logging in to get three inspirations a problem?

If someone was rotating their off-line characters to use II to get inspirations, more power to them. Very little gain for the effort, IMO.

This isn't a big deal in and of itself to me. It annoys me because:

• It was undocumented. If they did this under the auspices of it being an exploit, based on any so-called "exploit" we've discussed so far in the thread, I think someone needs a good smack.
• It seems overkill for anything we've thought of in this thread. This relates back to the first bullet. The idea that logging in, creating random inspirations, then logging out is exploitative boggles my mind. There are other "exploits" I've seen mentioned elsewhere, like changing builds to recharge it. You can only do that every 15 minutes, so I'm not seeing that as very scary either.
• It's completely unclear what's happening in game. There have been several threads by players not understanding what's up with the power, and also people chatting about it in global channels I frequent.

Pick any proc with an effect you find interesting. If it exists, look into its PPM as a store-bought enhancement. If it doesn't exist, you can probably make an educated guess about what its PPM might be should they create it as an SBE. Any power with a base recharge time equal to or greater than 60/PPM will have a 100% chance of the proc going off in it, when slotted in a single-target power. (AoEs are more complicated, and we don't know the exact formula.)

Wait, why wouldn't zombies show up there?

The most important thing is that we're talking about a trivial number of AVs here, in the scope of the content. We're not talking about turning all the Cyclopes and Minotaurs into AVs such that they could be farmed en masse. We're just talking about signature foes.

I can't see that creating the issue you're describing.

Like Xyzor, I'm a bit confused. The duration-to-recharge ratio of Shadow Meld is excellent. It's an excellent power, and quite popular to combine with Scrapper powersets that can't reasonably use IOs to softcap their defenses (or that don't invest a lot in IOs).

The primary downside to Shadow Meld is its activation time. It's actually pretty decent about providing its buff early-ish in the animation, but the activation is still a pretty long time to not be able to use other powers. So it's a bit risky to use reactively (you might die while activating it if you were badly hurt) and it cuts down on your DPS. However, I work around this by activating it proactively. Unlike some similar powers, Shadow Meld does not root you during activation, so you can activate it, run towards the enemy and probably be able to attack by the time you get there. Defeat a few foes before it expires and you'll be taking a lot less damage for the rest of the fight.

I don't understand people asking for this. That makes this thing significantly better than a Miracle unique in terms of EPS recovered. It puts it in the ballpark of unslotted Stamina all by itself.

Seriously? You're really asking for that?

There are a lot of things about this post I find questionable in an objective sense.

First, how, exactly, is Freedom "full-on" pay-to win? What are the things which you can buy which have absolutely unequivocal numerical gameplay superiority over their "free" equivalents, or which can only be bought? For the ones we can find, like the mention of the Decimation proc, above, are we sure that they are actually intended to be so superior, or are they like the example in the OP of this thread - something that was too good because it was not translated correctly from strict activation chance to this PPM system?

As Justaris mentions, I don't consider Incarnate content and powers "Pay to Win". They are "pay to progress beyond this point". That's a fairly typical F2P approach. Outside of that, everyone can get to 50 without ever touching F2P purchases.

Moreover, there have been long threads about other F2P systems. All F2P systems are not comparable, on several grounds. What were the revenues before the game went F2P? What was its prior player base size? What was the characterization of its existing player base: did it have lots of churn, or a loyal base of long-term subscribers?

CoH's F2P system could have almost certainly aimed for higher profits by risking alienating its existing veteran base. We've heard before that this game has an unusually high percentage of long-term loyal players compared to typical contemporary or predecessor MMOs. The most likely explanation for why CoH did not see as high relative revenue jumps were (a) its base revenues may not have been as low as other F2P transitions, (b) its F2P approach was more conservative, leaving more things as one-time or even zero-time purchases for long-term subscribers instead of trying to get money off of them.

Because, whether you like it or not, there's a difference.

Incarnate Trials were designed mechanically to be not soloable. This is not a matter of difficulty. The devs explicitly put in mechanisms to prevent this from happening. The only way to even approximate it is to get enough people to stay in the trial but do nothing. I am not defending this design choice, I am pointing out that it is present.

Most TFs and "classic" Triials are designed mechanically to be not soloable, because they will not start without multiple people on the team. Of course, people figured out pretty quickly how to approximate it more closely than we can with iTrials. Apparently the devs learned something from this, since they put in more stringent safeguards against dropping under the minimum league size for the iTrials.

Here's the important part. Most DA missions mechanically accept a team. Only a very few are designated as "solo mission". The ones that are not "solo missions" are not solo content. They are content which CAN be soloed. This is an absolutely critical difference which cannot be ignored in this discussion. Your quote above tries to say that the arguments when inverted are equivalent, but that's not true. We cannot solo in iTrials by fiat. We can team in Dark Astoria. iTrials are team-only. DA is team or solo.

Prior to Dark Astoria, such "content which can be soloed" contains a mix of strictly EB foes, and AV foes which can be downgraded to EBs. For major foes that, from a story perspective would rate as important as foes like Nemesis, Requiem, Drek, or Terra did in the 40s, it makes sense that these could be AVs.

By the way, when I go into DA, it is easier for my Incarnates, because I am level 50+3. Fighting a level 50 AV in a DA mission would be significantly easier for me than it would be in, say, a Founders Falls mission.

Except we've established that this is not true. It never has been true. Therefore, using it as a foundation of this argument leaves the argument unconvincing.

This doesn't follow at all. That's you creating a false dichotomy: Your foes must be weaker than they were previously or you have not become more powerful. You can become more powerful and still have challenging foes. By definition, those foes are more challenging that prior foes.

When I am level 50, I am more powerful than when I am level 40. I would not want the rank of foes I face at level 50 to be lower than that of those I face at level 40. Your position is equivalent to getting to level 50 and finding that all bosses are always level 40. Not wanting this is not hypocrisy.

Again I ask you: Why do you care? Is there some harm to your ego if there are more challenging settings that others can play on? So long as you get the experience you crave, why do you care of others can also?

If we were asking for something that was not available in the existing game mechanics, then our request would be unreasonable. We know with a high degree of certainty that this is not the case - singular EB foes could be made into AVs that scale back down to EBs under appropriate circumstances of difficulty settings or team size.


And yet it can with no game mechanical harm to the soloist.

Demonstrably false. DA is the "non-trial progression path". This is how it was referred to in beta. "Solo Incarnate Path" is a name given to it by players, not devs. Content in DA supports full teams of eight. It is not exclusively solo.

If you regularly hold the position that you're satisfied when businesses, even ones you like to patronize, start charging you for things which used to be complimentary, then more power to you, but I don't think you're very typical.

That those once-complimentary things weren't always available doesn't change the overall perspective.

There is no sensible justification for this position. Why do you care if it can be made harder so long as you get access to the same non-difficulty you have now?