New efforts!

[Arcana]

I did not like playing with lvl 50+4's incarnate people on any regular lvl 50 missions because they made the mission to easy.The first powers helped any end problems but after that they became to powerful on anywhere  but trials.Even the ITF with defense debuff's that would make it difficult for most of players became easy for 50+4's.Many times I would see them fight in different parts of the map because they didn't need the rest of the team.

Technically speaking, you couldn't be teaming with any 50 +4s in regular level 50 missions because you couldn't be +4 in regular missions.  Only the Alpha shift worked outside of incarnate trials.  You could only see (effectively) 50 +1 in regular content normally, and hypothetically speaking someone could have decided to use an ultimate +1 inspiration and be 50 +2.

But if you see someone soloing large spawns in the ITF, that's honestly 75% build, and 25% incarnate powers at most.  Also, no matter how powerful you were there were practical limits to going off on your own in the ITF.  Usually you could only do that during the speed portions of the ITF.  Many's a player that thought they were all that in ITFs when normally teamed because they were the last one standing and never seemed to need help and blah blah and tried to solo the entire thing only to discover there's a huge difference between not needing obvious help and not needing any help.  Particularly when you were in parts of the ITF that had a lot of shield stacking.  You could find yourself surrounded by targets who had stacked their defenses practically to the ceiling and were essentially all eluded, and on top of that were stacking enormous defense debuffs on you stripping most of your protection away. 

There were corner cases.  If you were, say, a Mind dominator you could confuse your way through most of it without a scratch.  If you were a really powerful granite tanker you could survive most anything but good luck killing anything if defense started to stack.  A really strong SR could avoid debuffs and have enough offense to prevent too much herding.  But outside of that people going off on their own in the ITF was mostly due to extremely powerful builds, usually with enormous offense or control.  There's no combination of Incarnate powers that by themselves makes it easy to kill a room full of Cims.

[LaughingAlex]

Technically speaking, you couldn't be teaming with any 50 +4s in regular level 50 missions because you couldn't be +4 in regular missions.  Only the Alpha shift worked outside of incarnate trials.  You could only see (effectively) 50 +1 in regular content normally, and hypothetically speaking someone could have decided to use an ultimate +1 inspiration and be 50 +2.

But if you see someone soloing large spawns in the ITF, that's honestly 75% build, and 25% incarnate powers at most.  Also, no matter how powerful you were there were practical limits to going off on your own in the ITF.  Usually you could only do that during the speed portions of the ITF.  Many's a player that thought they were all that in ITFs when normally teamed because they were the last one standing and never seemed to need help and blah blah and tried to solo the entire thing only to discover there's a huge difference between not needing obvious help and not needing any help.  Particularly when you were in parts of the ITF that had a lot of shield stacking.  You could find yourself surrounded by targets who had stacked their defenses practically to the ceiling and were essentially all eluded, and on top of that were stacking enormous defense debuffs on you stripping most of your protection away. 

There were corner cases.  If you were, say, a Mind dominator you could confuse your way through most of it without a scratch.  If you were a really powerful granite tanker you could survive most anything but good luck killing anything if defense started to stack.  A really strong SR could avoid debuffs and have enough offense to prevent too much herding.  But outside of that people going off on their own in the ITF was mostly due to extremely powerful builds, usually with enormous offense or control.  There's no combination of Incarnate powers that by themselves makes it easy to kill a room full of Cims.

So much truth to this.

[Leandro]

Something I wrote a long time ago when discussing Incarnate Shifts vs. raising the level cap:

I really hate how the level shifts and incarnate powers trivialized level 50 content and broke sidekicking. In avoiding raising the level cap, I believe the end result was worse than if they had. What if they'd extended the cap to level 60 instead?

First, the implications for existing content:

No permanent in-character level shifts. You just level up. Level shifts as a mechanic are retained for use in trials, but they're just that: a trial mechanic that provides a massive debuff or buff. For example, in the Magisterium trial you'd be a level 55 player facing against a level 65 AV, and picking the lights would apply level shifts to make you 55+9 -- but you'd never be something like "50+1" by default in a mission.

All level 50 Task Forces would exemplar players to 50, meaning players won't have access to powers they acquired over level 55 under the current exemplar rules. This is a massive nerf to player power while running those Task Forces, though they are pre-incarnate content so they were never prepared for that level of power to begin with.

A lot of already existing content would need to be shuffled around to take place at levels 51-60. Off the top of my head, this would make Apex and Tin Mage be level 50-55 Task Forces, BAF/Lambda/Keyes Level/Undeground/TPN 50-55, Diabolique/Mayhem/Magisterium level 55-60. Dark Astoria would be a 51 to 60 zone. The Brickstown and Cap Au Diable arcs would see the more dramatic change, going from 30-50 (being the worst timeline breakers) to 55-60. The Incarnate arcs (Vetrano, Number 6) would be placed around 50-60 where appropriate based on story progression.

Similarly, a bit (though not actually a lot) of content would need rewriting to remove references to things like Incarnate Shards. The intro Ramiel arc would just say the Well of the Furies has 'noticed' your rise in power and you will get new abilities, but that's it.

The Rikti Mothership Raid critters would need to be level-less so level 60s don't stomp them into a pulp while still making the raid available to 50s. Hamidon is already level-less, so no changes there. HOs would start dropping at the level of the player again, so you could get HOs up to level 60.

Invention enhancements would keep increasing in the % they buff; Purples would drop in the 50 to 60 range. Enhancement Boosters already had buffed level 50 enhancements to this point, so thank Statesman that ED exists to make it less ridiculous.

To avoid losing a lot of value in existing enhancements, enhancements could be attuned (the mechanic used by Paragon Store SOs to scale with your level). By attuning the purples you already have slotted, they'd remain usable as you level instead of requiring you to upgrade to level 60 stuff.

Now, how the progression would work:

New power picks at levels 51, 53, 55, 57 and 59. Three slots at levels 52, 54, 56, 58, and 60. Those power and slot picks are not limited to Incarnate-only stuff; if you don't care about, slotting, say, Hybrid, you could put those slots in a lower level power that needs them. If you dont care about getting Hybrid at all, you can get another power from your primary/secondary/pools.

Level 51 - Judgement, Interface and Hybrid unlocked. You can pick one of them or pick a power from earlier stuff.
Level 52 - 3 slots.
Level 53 - Power pick. Again, from any powers that are unlocked, incarnate or otherwise.
Level 54 - 3 slots.
Level 55 - Power pick, same as 53.
Level 56 - 3 slots.
Level 57 - Destiny and Lore unlocked. Pick either, or pick from earlier powers.
Level 58 - 3 slots.
Level 59 - Power pick, either from whatever you missed at 57 or anything earlier.
Level 60 - 3 slots.

So three things jump to the eyes: what happened to Alpha? Why is Hybrid an early power now? How do I get up the trees?

First, why no more trees: think of Judgement as a power pool that is limited to one power pick. All the basic powers will be there (meaning, the tier 1s) and you pick one. Pyronic, Cryonic, whichever: you now have a Judgement power that is part of your build. No such thing as an incarnate "tree".

How will the power grow in strength without the tree? Same as every other freaking power you got before: slots. Each Judgement power will be slottable. They will take TOs/DOs/SOs/Generic IOs as appropriate, so from the start you can put something in the power to improve it, without having to wait for specific trial drops.

But what about their special, branching effects? Simple: special enhancement sets that can be slotted only in those powers. If you have the Rebirth Barrier, for example, you can slot regular enhancements to improve its stats, the "Core Ephipany" invention set to add +HP or the "Radial Epiphany" set to add +Regen. The more pieces of the set, the stronger the effect, replacing the uncommon/rare/very rare tier of stuff. Note that there wouldn't be a different enhancement set for each power; the same "Core Epiphany" set could be slotted in Barrier and then it'd add buff duration, and the same "Radial Ephiphany" in Barrier would add the ally rez x2 effect.

Second, Hybrid and Alpha: Hybrid is a very lame ability to end the tree with. My personal theory is that the power developers realized how absurd the power creep had got with the previous 4 slots, and Hybrid was trying to get things back under control. It also has a similar end-use effect to alpha: it's just a buff, while Alpha was passive, Hybrid is a click/toggle. So rather than spend 2 power picks on the same thing, they're rolled into one.

Another reason to move it to 51 is to put the two "big ones", Destiny and Lore, at 57 and 59 -- just outside of the exemplar range of a level 50 TF. So while running a Statesman/Lord Recluse/Lady Grey, you would have access to Judgement, Interface and Hybrid only -- one big nuke and two support powers, not the multiplicative team-buff or the nasty pets. A level 55 TF (the first two being Apex and Tin Mage, remember) would have access to all the powers.

The Alpha part of the boost would be in the enhancement sets for Hybrid. The base ability for Hybrid would be the same (say you pick damage) and the IO sets you can slot in Hybrid would include the "enhacements for all powers that ignores ED" bit.

All those enhancement sets would drop from regular content and be tradable in the AH like any other invention, because that's all that would be. The Well is giving you extra powers, you're using your existing knowledge to make them better, just like you improved all your previous abilities.

TL;DR: Incarnate power picks while leveling up. Incarnate powers can be slotted. The tree goes away, and powers are instead improved through enhancements and enhancement sets, same as all other powers. 51-60 as a natural progression from 1-50, not a separate system with different rules.

[Twisted Toon]

Eh, I dunno I can sort of see it, at least with a Mastermind. Throw up personal force field and have your minions focus fire whilst you tank perhaps? I dunno.
As for a controller? Not entirely sure, although I'd imagine force fields might synergize quite nicely with Illusions crowd control and minion producing abilities.

I used Air Superiority, Force Bolt, and Repulsion Field to keep bosses flopping in the corner while the rest of mobs were harassed by Chaos, Mayhem, and Pandemonium...and Mr Phantasm. I even managed to Tank 2 Paragon Protector bosses while the rest of the team took on a third boss and the other lesser Paragon Protector guys during the Revenant mission.

All that while keeping the team in bubbles, and tossing out the Phantom Army as often as I could. Worked pretty well.

[Arcana]

Given the many problems such a system would have to overcome, I'm not sure what its compelling advantages are.  How would you sell such a system to the dev team, assuming the opportunity to do so ever arose.  The biggest problem to me that I can see is that it conventionalizes the incarnate system in ways that would be unpalatable to the point of having it in the first place.  Part of the whole point of the incarnate system being a break from the conventional leveling system was explicitly because it was a break: that clean break provided the opportunity to write new rules for that system without having to fight pre-existing player expectations about how it is "supposed" to work.

Nothing happens for only one reason, but one of the reasons the incarnate system existed in the first place was to address the desire by the devs to provide to the players something different than the normal 1-50 level progression system.  Changing it to the 1-60 system doesn't satisfy that design requirement.

[Arcana]

I used Air Superiority, Force Bolt, and Repulsion Field to keep bosses flopping in the corner while the rest of mobs were harassed by Chaos, Mayhem, and Pandemonium...and Mr Phantasm. I even managed to Tank 2 Paragon Protector bosses while the rest of the team took on a third boss and the other lesser Paragon Protector guys during the Revenant mission.

All that while keeping the team in bubbles, and tossing out the Phantom Army as often as I could. Worked pretty well.

I think the King of "sit back and eat a sammich while soloing" controllers was Grav/FF.  Given how much Singy liked to play with his food, even three minions could take some time to go down.  But it was a very inexorable juggernaut in terms of being almost impossible to kill in normal missions.

[LaughingAlex]

Given the many problems such a system would have to overcome, I'm not sure what its compelling advantages are.  How would you sell such a system to the dev team, assuming the opportunity to do so ever arose.  The biggest problem to me that I can see is that it conventionalizes the incarnate system in ways that would be unpalatable to the point of having it in the first place.  Part of the whole point of the incarnate system being a break from the conventional leveling system was explicitly because it was a break: that clean break provided the opportunity to write new rules for that system without having to fight pre-existing player expectations about how it is "supposed" to work.

Nothing happens for only one reason, but one of the reasons the incarnate system existed in the first place was to address the desire by the devs to provide to the players something different than the normal 1-50 level progression system.  Changing it to the 1-60 system doesn't satisfy that design requirement.

This, wholly.  Honestly I couldn't care about just increasing the level cap, and truthfully people who literally only cared about the level cap, I didn't see eye to eye with them for a reason.  Because to such players, you'll notice how often I complain about people who cared only about power, power and more power with little work.  Because I encountered such players in guild wars who had missed the entire point of the games low maximum level, which was a balancing measure and a means to make people think about how they approaching anything beyond just damage, healing and tanking.  Course, you still had "Only X team build would ever be used in X mission" problems(which was why I loved CoH a million times more, that and more abilities to use), but GW was meant to be a game where skill rather than time played mattered.

People who care exclusively about power and nothing else and bullying everything, to me, just want easy mode handed to them in a sense, or to not have to think about any kind of strategy being used.  They lack creativity.  Even funnier is how they complain about something being to easy after they'd power leveled to the max and then fight everything far lower than them.  But to me, power by itself means nothing if there isn't anything fun to use it against and many of these types won't care about how powerful anything else is.  They only care that they got easy mode just by spending a huge amount of time playing the game but not actually earning anything or learning anything far as I could tell.

Especially since they ironically take the game super seriously enough that they run away from anything of any amount of challenge or threat :).

Edit: I am not downtalking min/maxers, just those who only care about level cap increases.

[LaughingAlex]

Thinking of the above, I remember a cousin of a friend of mine who used to, literally, cheat in final fantasy 7.  So he should have no trouble killing emerald weapon right?  Well, the kid ran from Emerald weapon, every, single, time.  Cowardice/wanting easy victories endlessly in a nutshell.

I beat emerald weapon without cheats....yeah.

[Vee]

I found ruby way harder than emerald, but beat them both without cheating. not even sure how one would cheat in FF7. gameshark i guess?

[HEATSTROKE]

Back when the market first arrived, people were selling off dmg/rng HOs for next to nothing. So I slotted 3 in each ranged power of my nrg/nrg and then used boost range to be utterly stupid. In practice my snipe/T2 combo went off before a nemesis sniper could shoot me. Was about the only build I never IOd.

finally.. someone else yo learned that range on a blaster could easily be your BEST defense.

[Taceus Jiwede]

All this talk of build's and TF's and Incarnate and HO's and IO's and what not is really making me miss the game.  Miss the hell out of my blaster.

[Von Krieger]

All this talk of build's and TF's and Incarnate and HO's and IO's and what not is really making me miss the game.  Miss the hell out of my blaster.

*debuffs your accuracy to the floor* Now your Blaster is a hell of misses! *cackles madly*

[LaughingAlex]

I found ruby way harder than emerald, but beat them both without cheating. not even sure how one would cheat in FF7. gameshark i guess?

Yupe, gameshark with a very, very faulty "god mode" code that only really gave the characters around 4000 health.  The guy was also a total moron using stupid and impractical items like cats bell even though his characters were invulnerable.  But then just about any cheater is a moron :).

[Arcana]

power by itself means nothing if there isn't anything fun to use it against

On the subject of ITFs and general abuse of ludicrous power, I managed to locate this:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/349/18782920072_f4150f3e8f_z.jpg

(Original size here.)

This is me, earning Master of ITF.  To be more precise, this is me soloing MITF, kind of.  All six members of that team are alts of mine on different accounts.  Only three of them ever actually entered a mission even once (the rest are padding to start the ITF).  I only really ever used two at a time.  I *think* MITF was actually soloable, but I never got the chance to find out.  I do know for a fact a Stone/Stone tanker and a Mind/Earth dominator can basically dual it.  I'm not sure if a maximal Mind/Earth dominator could solo ITF, but I was working on it.  I heard reports of people soloing ITF, but I don't know if anyone managed to solo an MITF.

Power is useless without something interesting to use it on, but I never ran out of interesting things to use it on.  Also, true story: none of those alts were power leveled.  They were all leveled conventionally.  Even the fillers.  Actually, if I recall correctly I used the fillers to conduct a leveling experiment.  I think they were all Claws/Shield, Claws/Electric, and Claws/Fire, and I wanted to see which one would reach 50 in the least amount of playtime.  Claws/Fire won.

Also noteworthy is the date of that picture: 10/2/2011.  In other words, I was doing this crazy thing a month after the shutdown notice.

I had a theory that with the right build and tactics, Mind/Earth dominators were what I called maximally soloable.  Meaning, if it was soloable at all, Mind/Earth could solo it.  If Mind/Earth couldn't solo it, it wasn't soloable.  Not for all content that could possibly exist, but for all content the devs were ever willing to create.

[Vee]

That pick almost brings a QQ - as in the chat window are Tam and Greev doing the V meme, no doubt to mess with me as that's what everyone called me. We never actually figured out why GE would just randomly say 'v' in Triumph watch but we suspected it was a keybind he'd hit not noticing he was in chat. I got tired of saying 'what?' after a while but they never got tired of repeating it when he would do it. And now and again i still get an email from Malkore with just 'v' as the message.

Also Arcana if you really had claw/shield toons i cry hax and am insanely jealous.

[Aggelakis]

Also noteworthy is the date of that picture: 10/2/2011.  In other words, I was doing this crazy thing a month after the shutdown notice.

But.... sunset was 2012...

10/2/2011 was shortly after Freedom...

[Arcana]

But.... sunset was 2012...

10/2/2011 was shortly after Freedom...

It might have been 2012, it was so long ago and I was doing a lot of silly things in the last 90 days of the game.  Then again it might be 2011.  I dated it 2011 at the time, but that now seems too early.  Now I'll need to completely grep my chatlogs to find out when that actually happened.

[Arcana]

Also Arcana if you really had claw/shield toons i cry hax and am insanely jealous.

I mostly remember they were all Claws, because Claws had a small unfair leveling advantage built into its powers (specifically its AoE powers).  I'm positive one was Claws/Fire.  I'm a bit hazy on the rest, and I didn't Sentinel my dummy accounts before the end came.  I'm probably just conflating another shield brute with those; I leveled so many alts in so many ways just to test the powersets, much less play them regularly.

[Vee]

my guess would be claws/dark as you'd presumably only be testing sets with a damage aura for leveling speed.

[Arcana]

Nothing happens for only one reason, but one of the reasons the incarnate system existed in the first place was to address the desire by the devs to provide to the players something different than the normal 1-50 level progression system.  Changing it to the 1-60 system doesn't satisfy that design requirement.

Since most of the discussion surrounding the incarnate system revolved around the downside or avoidance thereof raising the level cap, its probably worth discussing why the incarnate system was a good idea, separate from why raising the level cap was a bad idea.  I think the most important feature of the incarnate system has to do with how progression worked in CoH (and most MMOs).

In most MMOs, there's a leveling system of some kind.  Usually, levels are linear: you go from one level to the next, from level one to level whatever.  Obviously, this is linear progression.  There could be different options available to you as part of progression, like in City of Heroes you unlock power slots but you had some choice in which power you took, but that doesn't change the strongly linear nature of leveling.

Generally, there's another kind of progression as well, what usually shows up as gear, or in CoH enhancements.  We can, through various acquisition methods, improve our builds by buying things.  This form of progression is not linear, and tends to be much more wide open.  Certainly, there are gates involved not the least of which is the means to afford things, but usually your options are far less linear.

There are pros and cons to each kind of progression.  With linear leveling, there's a very strong sense of progress.  There are level bars and dinging the next level, and things unlocking in sequence.  Psychologically it "feels" like leveling; it feels like making progress.  With gear, the sense of progress tends to be much more diffuse.  There is a sense of getting stronger, better, more powerful, but the sense of ratcheting forward is either subtle or completely absent.  On the other hand, the freedom of motion in the gear system is far higher.  Not only can players explore far more options, the developers can also create more options with more freedom.  That freedom is mostly eliminated in the linear progression system.  Its non-trivial to simply change what the level progress is like at a certain level once its created.  Its difficult or impossible to expand the system, except upward.

The incarnate system was a hybrid of these two progressional systems.  On the one hand, within an incarnate family there was linear progress much like the standard leveling system.  There was incarnate XP, and that XP was essentially used to unlock the slot.  From there, resources were used to build increasingly powerful abilities within that family.  But although progress within each family was initially linear, except for Alpha you were free to decide which family to make progress in.  You could unlock the slots in any order.  It would be as if you were allowed to level from 50 to 51, then from 51 to 54, then from 54 to 52, then 52 to 53.  You can't do that in a linear system.  But in the incarnate system, you could decide which things to unlock in which order, and decide what effort to put into doing that.  There was structure, but also freedom.  And not just freedom for the players: the devs had a lot more freedom in the incarnate system to expand and modify the system, because they were freed from linear leveling.

The system wasn't perfect by any means, and much of its potential was unrealized.  The incarnate power trees were far more shallow than they could have been, and just plain weird in ways they should not have been (why the options available increased with tier until the last tier, then contracted, is almost certainly either a design error or a design compromise).  But I believe that had the game continued on, as the devs continued to add content to the system (including non-raid content that offered incarnate XP) it had the potential to be this new thing that was half gear and half linear progression with the addition of a spectrum of families of linear progression.  Suppose, for example, the devs extended the function of incarnate XP so that instead of just unlocking a slot, additional XP would unlock features of the slot.  For example, suppose earning tier 2 unlock of a slot granted a discount for crafting tier 2 powers.  Or suppose it unlocked more options for those powers.  We could have fixed that diamond-shaped power tree by adding powers that were unlocked with sufficient incarnate XP, say.  Downstream, perhaps years downstream, I could even see opportunities to create cross-family progress synergies.  Gameplay elements were earning tiers in one power would open certain limited doors in other powers.  There's simply no way to create or represent that sort of progressional ideas in linear progress systems.

If the game had continued on, and years from now after the system had matured, I think we would have been looking at the incarnate system as one of CoH's better innovations.  It could have become the equal of the invention system in terms of its game-changing nature, albeit focused on the high end of the game.  I believe CoH archetypes happened to implement close to the best possible balance of structure and freedom when it came to building characters.  You had the freedom to build a wide range of character possibilities and archetype was not a critical limiter of functionality.  But it enforced enough structure to make build choices interesting, and encourage replay under different choices.  The incarnate system could have evolved into a similar balance of structure and freedom, stealing the best features of both linear progress and open enhancement.  Its a shame we'll never know.