Chris24601

Now that I'm established, my general rule for a smooth ride is to six slot two powers you can put the two ATO sets if its at all practical (its not for controllers because their ATOs don't boost damage, but most of the rest do) because slotting those two sets at level 10-11 for the set bonuses makes a HUGE difference to pre-SO performance (ex. +9% acc is like putting an extra +3 TO into all your attacks while slots are at a premium). This doesn't mean I'm actually dropping a ton of inf on them anymore either. I'm on my fourth scrapper, but only one of those I've been happy enough with to catalyze the ATOs at 50. The other two and the one I'm currently leveling have all used the same set of ATOs that I just unslotted and mailed to the new toon. Beyond those two though I tend to stick to relatively cheap and easy mainstays like Thunderstrike and Crushing Impact. At 3-5 million per full attuned set those actually save me money over SO's in the long run and are "good enough" in terms of set bonuses. If you're not trying to break any records, sets without any procs or gimmicks like those I think actually give you better overall benefit from their sixth slot worth of enhancement bonuses than a damage proc will get you in some of the the more expensive sets. I'm also someone who got my funds my just playing the story arcs and turning the merits into converters and dumping them on the market for 1 inf each so its not like I even blew more time on that that I used to re-buying my SOs every 5 levels in the olden days and WAY less than I did in the old IO days where IOs were in separate categories by level and attuned wasn't even a thing yet. Another trick I have is that, if you buy the double XP power from P2W right out of the Galaxy tutorial, then run the Freedom Atlas Park arcs (Matt Habashy, etc.) you can ding level 10 inside of 15 minutes with enough merits (I forget whether its 9 or 15 from the three quick arcs) to get yourself 2-3 million inf via converters and not have to worry about paying for slotting again until you reach SO levels.

They do, but he’s so busy dealing with Hellion arsonists in Steel Canyon that he never has time to do routine inspections. 🤣 It is also a little known fact* that the Circle of Thorns has spent the past century slowly replacing every architect in Paragon City with one of their members and their seemingly labrynthine designs are actually arcane waveguides that channel the ambient magic of the city’s ley lines into Oranbega for their rituals. * This fact is completely made up, but makes more sense than any other explanation I’ve heard for Paragon’s bizarre indoor architecture.

The Blaster stacking status protection proc is my top tier. I’d love it on some of my other ATs that lack mez protection. Not a proc and the global +crit for scrappers isn’t flashy, but seeing those big numbers and “critical” over targets is its own reward. I’m least impressed with the controller sets mainly because they’re a poor fit in the main powers that that also do damage and are the only means a solo reasonably has of defeating anything with any speed and many of the powers you’d consider slotting aren’t ones you’re naturally prone to six-slotting.

In the way olden days my first toon was a magic themed blaster (back around i3). Being magic themed, I just presumed I should be fighting magic enemies and proceeded to solo my way through all the Circle of Thorns arcs. In the process I learned every corner, nook and cranny of the Oranbega maps and never realized until much later that they were considered “hard.” Personally, they’re my favorite just because they’re so thematic and flavorful... and not even hard to navigate if you’re familiar with them.

I’d actually be okay with that. It does open up a line of thought though that might diminish the amount of work needed for brand new sets and be a solution to my problem with the controller ATOs... what if you had limited access to the ATOs of other classes as one of your two. For example; either of the two blaster ATO sets/procs would work far better for my grav/storm controller than the current controller ones. Obviously, not every set can work. Scrapper crit improvement only works if you have crits in the first place, but the blaster’s stacking mez protection proc would work for anyone (though not really needed on the melee classes with built-in mez protection). This is why I’d suggest specifically curated access. As a possible example, for the controller allow it to also choose the blaster ATO with the mez protection proc and say, the defender ATO with the minor heal (i.e. focusing a bit in the direction of their secondary instead of their primary). My main line of thinking here is it could avoid having to build new sets from scratch and the desire to make those unique from any already existing set when that’s not as needed. The downside is that some sets don’t share as well as others (i.e. just about anyone could use the two blaster sets, but anything that interacts with class mechanics (ex. placate or domination) won’t be shareable, leading some ATs to lose a small bit of their individuality while others keep theirs. Whether that’s a worthwhile trade for the savings in designing new sets I leave to people who know how to measure such things.

If that’s not possible, I wouldn’t mind seeing an immobilize or even hold put into the Force Field set; If they have the control to let allies shoot out if their bubbles, they should be able to make them one-way in the other direction (instead of using intangible). Throw in massive knockback protection on the target while you’re at it so people with a FF on the team don’t need to sweat knockback. I dunno if there’s an animation for pounding on cell door or similar, but have the held target use that animation while held would be quite funny. While I don’t like to ignore the Cottage Rule; in this case I am for stretching it to the absolute limit. Turn the force bolt and repulsion bomb into actual damage dealers (maybe with some “dazed” debuffs to recharge and damage reflecting the extra potence of the knockback), replace the intangible with a hold as outlined above, add stacking absorb to all the bubbles (“ablative force field”)

Not 0, but Gust from Storm Summoning is epic. So is Gravity’s Lift.

My best solo results have been with; A) Archery/Tac Arrow Blaster: Range + high to-hit lets you fire off sniper shots at near full strength every five seconds. Tac Arrow adds a number of damage types to the set, with electrified net arrow adding energy, which many things strong against lethal are weak to (ex. robots and ghosts) and which has a 1 second recharge time so you can immobilize ANYTHING. B) Street Justice/Willpower Scrapper with Mu Mastery. Air Superiority replaced Initial Strikes in my build for better control, all three leadership buffs rounded it out. It’s soloed every Task Force needed for the TFCommander badge while IN the level range for it (i.e. not exemplared down). C) Grav/Storm Controller: It takes a little time to mature, but once you have Hurricane it just gets easier and easier. I call it Chaostrolling because wormholing enemies onto your singularity with your hurricane pushing them all into a corner and a permanent tornado and thunderstorm blasting them... it abuses the game physics so badly it has literally pushed mobs through the geometry and into other sections (most recently from the upper level of a warehouse map through the corner and down into the hallway that looped around behind it). Solid debuffs like freezing rain and snow storm help a lot against AVs and between hurricane’s debuff, mist + hover you’re nearly softcapped before you even add set bonuses.

I’ll echo this. As a controller who mostly solos, slotting your single target immobilize and hold for damage is a must if you want to complete missions at anything but a glacial pace. Both also cycle fast enough that once they’ve got an IO set in them you can stack the hold 3-4 times on a single target without needing hold enhancements in it. And before anyone suggests I need to just team more so my damage won’t be an issue allow me to give you two words; Grav/Storm. In the current group meta I’d have to turn off my singularity, hurricane, tornado and lightning storm and not use Propel (since I refuse to give up my six-slotted Thunderstrike set bonuses by slotting the idiotic knockdown proc*) and everything melts before my controls matter anyway. I’m basically down to my ST hold, immobilize and the medicine pool. Just about every control set has at least two damaging controls. What I’d like to see is an ATO set worth slotting into those. If you wanted to make that set game-changing like some of the other ATOs; skip the proc entirely and give the set both damage AND control enhancement in the same set. For example; acc/dam/control acc/end/recharge dam/control/endurance dam/control/recharge acc/dam/control/endurance acc/dam/control/recharge As it stands, I’d have to six-slot grav distortion field and maybe wormhole if I actually wanted to use the current ATO sets, and I have so many more useful powers that need the slots instead. So whereas my scrappers and blasters and even defenders have to decide which of their many powers will best employ their ATO procs... the controller ATOs are utterly useless to me and I’ll be skipping them entirely. * sidebar: I don’t know how feasible it is, but I’d like to suggest a P2W utility power that converts all knockback to knockdown. Given the price of those knockdown procs everyone expects you to slot in everything, you could set it at 10 million inf and it’d be a bargain for those who insist on slotting those procs and a good inf sink to boot.

Alternatively, it’s a step down from “pick the precise door” but “pick zone” and the system assigns a random door that matches the map type in the zone (just as it does for virtually all the pre-Going Rogue arcs) would be a step in that direction. That said, I do see the argument that it should be divorced from AE even if it otherwise uses the mission architect mechanics to build it. AE is intended to be a holodeck so triggering the missions from there doesn’t make a lot of sense. Rather, I think the MA system should have an option of “publish to AE” or “publish to Zone Kiosk.” If they choose the latter, the mission is accessed by a kiosk (are the old PVP ranking ones still used for anything?) present in each zone which places the designated contact skin onto an otherwise invisible version of the AE contact dummy somewhere in the zone and each mission is tagged to a door in the assigned zone. This also means these missions need a distinctive hero/villain tag so they only turn up on kiosks of people who can accept those missions/access those zones (i.e. no sense in a mission series set on Mercy Island showing up for a hero). The key immersive point would be that you can only access the mission lists from the kiosks, not edit missions, so anyone going there is doing so as a hero/villain looking for hero/villain bulletins. Perhaps instead of the kiosks the system could be merged with the radio/newspaper and/or the tips windows while we’re at it in that it puts up a UI with both a random tip for your alignment and three radio missions and a section below for the searchable list of user generated content.

I am behind this proposal; which means I’m going to break it down to figure out what’s needed. First, we already have the framework in that they need to be an alternate path for the existing tips to fit the existing model. The trick is I think we actually need to create the opposite of what we’re thinking to make it work. Now, I’ll be honest, I’ve not really played any of the vigilante to villain missions. I hate playing complete monsters and even on live I weant rogue (if not hero) as early as possible. As a result I’m going to be talking about implementing rogue options into the Paragon City missions for them. The first and most important point that has be addressed in this regard is that, almost without fail, the rogue to hero missions in Paragon almost invariably involve the rogue TRYING to enact a roguish scheme, but unplanned events generally lead to you NOT getting your payday, but inadvertently doing something that makes you look like a hero (or at least getting out of the debacle without looking guilty) while doing so. Translation: until the morality mission your rogue is still trying to be a rogue, but the universe isn’t cooperating. You more stumble into heroism than choose it until the morality mission. Which presents a problem in terms of creating an alternate path for them; you basically have to edit the universe instead of altering your actual choice. Take “A compromising photograph” for example; Manticore blackmails you into helping Longbow with a mission. You, being a rogue, stretch the mission parameters so you can also rob the safe of the villain Longbow is raiding and you end up rescuing some heroes in the process and end up looking like a hero because the system you were supposed to bypass was boobytrapped and would have killed them with poison gas if you disabled it as ordered, but your sabotage so you could also rob the safe releases sleeping gas instead). There’s not really a good place to split that off while still being a rogue (i.e. looking to score a payday vs. evil for evil’s sake). Maybe trying to steal back the compromising evidence against you... from Manticore while you’re level 20 and with modern media storage making it near impossible to get every backup he’s certain to have. Yeah, trying to score a payday while doing a mission you don’t particularly want to is the roguish angle already. Likewise, leaving the unconscious heroes behind to be sold into slavery or worse... that’s pretty solidly villain rather than rogue so you gotta rescue them. Where I honestly think the reinforcement almost needs to come is NOT all the tip missions, but in an alternate for the Heroic Morality Mission at the end, but the problem there is that the alignment switch mission are also the hero reaffirming missions. Where’s the payday on trying to stop Longbow from taking out Doc Quantum, or convincing Blast Furnace to not be a villain or rescuing a rogue Bane Spider scheduled for execution. The main payday in all of those would be... don’t get involved. You’d almost have an easier time adding missions for the rogue in Paragon missions that work from an actively trying to be a hero perspective and re-labeling the current ones as the Rogue alignment tip missions and create the four rogue reconfirmation missions for having done ten of the current ones. Like, in the above case, leave the current option as the Rogue Alignment and add a heroic version where you decide to play the mission straight. You go to disable the security system, but catch that it’s trapped to kill everyone with poison gas if it’s tampered with so instead you have to help the heroes escape after the security system goes off. Longbow blames you for the screwup, but afterwards you get another note from Manticore telling you that he knows why you didn’t disable the system and so has destroyed the evidence (i.e. the public may not see you as a hero yet, but another hero recognized your intentions. Likewise, from looking at a few of the vigilante missions in the Rogue Isles on the wiki, it seems like most of them hinge on you making very dark choices but still with the motivation of stopping a greater threat. Take “A Trashcan Set On Vibrate” for an example; you’re trying to stop an Archon from powering himself up using the life essence of captured heroes who are now near death and discover the best way to shut the villain down is let those captured heroes die. Rescuing the heroes and fighting the still empowered villain is hero morality; the decision is the right call for vigilante as defined in city of heroes. So make that choice the vigilante one. For the villain one we need a more callous ends justify the means option. Instead of just shutting the archon down, you go in with the plan to take the empowerment process for yourself to help you more effectively take down “real villains” and instead killing the heroes to power down the archon, you use the process on yourself to put you on the level of the archon. This kills the two weaker subjects and the after mission blurb states that even though you saved the two others, they’re looking at you like you’re a monster. At that point you could just keeps the existing rogue/vigilante confirmation missions you have now; just allow them to drop no matter your location instead of only in the Isles for Rogues and Paragon for Vigilantes.

The problem is that if the choice is to be a sub-par tanker or sub-par blaster or sub-par sentinel; its a choice that shouldn't need to be made. Its anything BUT epic at the moment. The fundamental problem with the AT is that the mechanics of the game don't reward "Jack of All Trades" it rewards specializing and leaves those jacks as basically "masters of none." I have a scrapper right now who could deal out ranged damage as well as a nova (claws + ancillary fire) and tank probably as well a dwarf (willpower rise to the challenge + confront + spin/damage in general) while doing superior damage in melee and with mez protection... without even needing change forms to do it (i.e. if I have a runner while I'm in the middle of melee, I just throw a focus or a fire blast at it; I don't need to drop to human form and give up my resistance and mez protection just to get it). If it doesn't have to make a choice between those options why should a PB? ETA: If you want the slotting to determine the focus, then the options have to be good enough that if you choose dwarf you can tank like a tanker because you can't blast like a blaster or be a sentinel in human form as effectively... the lack of slots alone will keep it from being able to be all things at once.

In terms of slots, the only reasonable solutions I can devise that are fair to the other ATs are, A) instead of adding new powers in the forms, it modifies your existing powers... basically take the same process that let’s nova keep glinting eye and dwarf to keep the gleaming bolt and apply it across the board. The upside is fewer things to slot. The downside is if you don’t take one of the attacks the form uses, your form won’t have that attack either. B) The form attacks can’t be directly slotted, but pull their enhancement values from the slots in the main form. The downside there is dwarf needs many more categories of enhancements than Nova would (Nova six-slotted with a damage set would cover basically everything it does; dwarf needs damage, resistance and taunt at the minimum). C) The values for the form attacks scale automatically as if slotted with a generic attuned IO set (i.e. enhancement bonuses, but not set bonuses) while the forms themselves are modified by the usual to-hit buff, fly, resist and end mods enhancement slotting. To make up for the lack of control, some of the secondary effects that are rarely slotted for (ex. Defense debuffs from PB attacks) might also be enhanced. B+C) The attacks scale based on the enhancements sloted in the form power (as with B), but the other effects (ex. damage resist, taunt and teleport for dwarf, fly speed and to-hit buffs for nova) scale with character level as if slotted (as in C). The ideal for me needs a Standard Code Rant warning... the attacks are buffs per option C, but the bonus is conditional with the number of slots in the form (i.e. four slots in nova means their attacks are enhanced as if they had four slots in each).

As someone who mostly ends up soloing, I MUCH prefer knockBACK on my ranged attacks. To be blunt about it, knock up never knocks a mob INTO anything and that’s the difference between the mob getting up and shooting you again in 2 seconds or the ragdoll physics leaving them flailing and helpless for 5-10 seconds as it tries to dislodge itself from the geometry. Particularly in the squishy Nova form, knockBACK provides far superior mitigation to knockUP when you %#&$ up an pull more than planned. I do NOT get this obsession with converting ever last bit of knockback into knockup. Scattering can be useful mitigation and even in large groups it makes about half a second’s difference in the rate an 8-man team melts a spawn. It’s to the point I feel like the knockback to knockup proc is one of the single biggest banes to the game; that people are compromising their set bonuses just to kill things on radio missions half a second faster. Leave my Kheldian Knockback alone. I love it and knockback in general has kept all my squishier characters alive way better than knockup ever has. Down with the Knockup Hegemony!!! 😜 ETA: How much do I love knockback? I love it Grav/Storm much!!!

Okay, the issue is you’re using morality vs. ethics (and the term moral relativism) in a 180 degree opposite way from any I’ve ever heard used. Moral relativism isn’t “the relegation of ethical behavior as being determined by morality.” It is the declaration that all moralities are equal because they must be judged by the ethics of the culture in which they are found. Moral relativism says its wrong, for example, to condemn groups which employ female genital mutilation because such actions are seen as good by their culture (note that things like that, and it’s logically inconsistent premise that all forms of morality are equal... except that moral relativism is superior... is why moral relativism is a load of garbage). Likewise, in the US legal system, ethics refers entirely to following the proper laws and procedures, not whether a certain action is morally right or wrong. The Ethical decision in the US legal system is to follow the law (i.e. return the slaves) regardless of whether the outcome is morally right. Something just occurred to me... your reference to internal British politics around the time of the US Revolution leads me to ask... are you American? I ask because your definitions of ethics vs. morals seem entirely out of phase with how they are used in the United States and that perhaps this where our mutual confusion comes in. My studies in America either do not distinguish morals from ethics (i.e. they’re synonymns for the same concepts) or, if they do distinguish them, describe ethics as socially/state determined right and wrong while morality is individually judged right and wrong. Likewise, the definition of Moral Relativism I used above is the American understanding of the philosophy. However, if you’re not American then your definitions of ethics and morality might be a bit different just as chips, biscuits and football are different for Americans vs. British. Americans in general skew towards personal liberty over social consensus when it comes to judging right from wrong and thus, generally regard “morality” (i.e. personal judgement) as superior to ethics (i.e. social judgment). Likewise, while Superman has always adapted to the times, he’s fundamentally the creation of two Jewish immigrant boys living in pre-WW2 America’s industrialized North and started out fighting for the rights of the little guy against exploitation by the establishment. If anything, were Superman to have been created in the pre-Civil War era (but still created by immigrants in the industrial North c. 1858) he’d most likely have been an Abolitionist symbol against the evils of slavery and personally opposed to it (what you seem to regard as an ethical decision to oppose it, but what Americans would call a moral choice... again, language drift may be involved).

Yeah, ADDING Endurance/min. would be fine, but in actual practice the Rec/sec. and End used/sec. are MUCH easier for figuring out sustainable attack chains and the like. This is because power activations are measured in seconds so End cost / activation time gives you how much End/sec. that power is eating. If that plus your toggle costs is higher than your Rec/sec. then you know your END bar will be going down so you either need some lighter powers later in the chain or plan around keeping enough blues in your inspiration tray to deal with longer fights.

Not sure I quite get your distinction on morality vs. ethics. The terms are generally considered synonymous (even by philosophers of ethics). For that matter, in the few places that DO make such a distinction, morality is almost invariably held to be a higher ideal than ethics (with morality positioned as right vs. wrong while ethics is lawful vs. unlawful) so I don’t quite get why Superman placing a higher ideal above a lesser one would be regarded as a negative thing. If I’m going to have a de facto physical god as a hero in a setting I’d much rather have one who puts doing the right thing over following the law because laws can be unjust and even evil. Returning runaway slaves in the Antebellum South was the law. I’ll ALWAYS side with the hero who says “I’m helping these slaves escape because its the right thing to do” over one who says “I am ethically bound to follow the law and return these human beings to their enslavement.” That second guy is a villain using unjust laws as an excuse for his actions. Superman AND Captain America (and any hero of mine) would punch that second guy in the face and rescue the slaves from him. Superman putting morality ahead of ethics sounds more like a feature than a bug to me.

Not really a solution so much as a workaround is that I use [civilian name]-[hero name] for my names. There’s a lot less chance of both parts being previously taken. The only downside is the character limit for name means you have to keep both short. Alternatively, if there’s no reason for a particular concept to have a secret identity then I just use a given name. Lots of my magic origin toons who are members of the Midnight Squad go that route.

I started one, but there’s this really off-putting reverb and volume mismatch on the associated sound-effect for the single-target hold that is completely out of sync with the rest of the set and I just had to drop and re-roll as something else. The best way I can describe is, if you were listening to rest of the set from a speaker 10 feet away, the ST hold sounds like you moved to 5 feet from the speaker and turned the base up. It’d be one thing of the whole set was like that; Grav is probably my favorite set and it is a noisy set... but it’s a consistent level of noisy. Since this is a personal tick I don’t need it changed if everyone else likes it. What I could use help with though are finding the file names for sounds effects of the darkness control single target hold and immobilize so I can do a sound file swap in data folder (I want both the immobilize and hold to use the immobilize sound effect). THAT would entirely take care of my problem (and I can roll up a toon for it because the play was nice other than that one sound). Thank you to whoever could help with that in advance. 😊

Here’s their exact words from the 2012 AMA courtesy of ParagonWiki; After the Battalion, what was the next "big idea" that was going to come down the road, if you had thought that far ahead? MM: The Dimensionless are a race of beings superior to the Wells. Dealing with them once you became a well unto yourself was the next logical step. STM: One of the ideas was that you kind of “cheat” to defeat Battalion, in essence doing something that should take you being level 50 ++++++++ and doing it at level 50, shattering the source of Battalion. However, this meant that a ton of things that were controlled by Battalion were now freed to do whatever they want, so the threats were unknown but out there, and now it was the responsibility of the players to go out there and handle them. ETA: My key takeaways from those quotes in terms of power-up grind were “once you became a well unto yourself” and that the Dimensionless were superior to the Wells and would have to be dealt with.

That. Was unfortunate. Basically killed all rewatch value the series had (knowing what became of Product Placement Pete’s actor didn’t help the early seasons either). On a related note though, and in relation to the dislike of Superman for certain “moral but not ethical” things by the poster you were replying to, it does highlight... which VERSION of Superman do they mean? Golden Age is not Silver Age is not Post-Crisis is not New52 is not Rebirth is not Christopher Reeve films is not Diniverse is not Lois & Clark is not Smallville is not DCEU is not Arrowverse Superman. I doubt that other than the most basic premises there’s anything consistent enough to complain about as a defining trait... not even the “love triangle for two” which all modern versions since Smallville have abandoned, with Lois finding out from either before the start (DCEU and Smallville) to Clark revealing the secret within months (Arrowverse and current comics) is consistent between versions. At this point trying to pin a particular character flaw on Superman is like trying to ascribe one to Robin Hood. At best, you can critique one particular interpretation.

I’m quite happy with Gravity as it is. At the lowest levels immobilize and rag-doll knockup on short timers reduces your incoming damage significantly while you still have enough health relative to damage dealt at those levels for that to be significant. Lift, particularly with your level 3 slots and the prestige damage/recharge enhancements, does significant damage at those levels and recharges in 4s so you’ve got an attack every 2s even before any P2W powers at level 3. Gravity Distortion with its 8s timer doesn’t do enough to mitigate incoming damage on its own. You need lift or crush (or both) with it to juggle and defeat a typical spawn and the occasional over-aggro without face planting (plus crush, grav distortion and lift are a reasonable attack chain you can have in place by level 4). They also are low enough on Endurance cost to be manageable when you have virtually no slots. Not every set has to be a cookie cutter with different graphic FX on top. Gravity is a set that skews more towards damage with its hold doing more damage and lift/propel as heavy hitters (particularly with containment/impact) with mitigation via knockdown (using grav distortion first cancels the knockback). I am rediscovering my love for the set as I rebuild my “chaostroller” (grav/storm), the synergy between hurricane and crush/crushing field in just disabling all ability of enemies to retaliate is fantastic. Throw in wormhole to throw them all in a corner with singularity, tornado and lightning storm while you hold them there with crushing field and hurricane... I almost pity the poor mobs.

::Looks at my store bought blackwand and Skipper’s anti-ghost divining rod and the holy shotgun shells from that guy in Striga:: Maybe because its magic? 😄

As I recall from the AMAs they said we’d basically “cheat” our way up the Incarnate ladder to beat the Battalion and would basically end up with each PC being their own Well and this would draw the notice and ire of the Dimensionless who somehow oversaw the Wells and would be basically Coming Storm 2.0. Now, I don’t mind the “basically, you cheat” method of beating an enemy group. Changing the nature of the conflict against an unstoppable foe to an arena where you CAN fight them is superhero 101 (a prime example is the first Iron Man film. Tony can’t beat Stane’s suit in a head-to-head... but did Stane solve the icing problem? That turns the tide). What I dislike is the “now you permanently have even MORE power” ending. Superman or Spider-Man don’t gain radically new powers when they overcome even cosmic threats. They “cheat” then go back to their baseline. With HC free of the need to sell new content and grind to make a profit, THAT can actually be the norm of new stories here. If an opponent’s too big for head-to-head (ex. Empowered Recluse at the end of MLTF) then we “cheat” (take out his empowerment machine first) in order to win the day. I realize the genie is out of the bottle, but if could make one probably unpopular change to City of Heroes, I would have removed all the Incarnate powers and re-tuned the Praetorian War content to be normal 50-54 content. Cole still feels the need to invade due to the threat a “chaotic” world like Primal Earth poses to his deal with Praetorian Hamidon, but there’s no “empowered by the Well which wants a champion before the Battalion show up” nonsense muddying that up. I think the game would be healthier if The Well had never been introduced (except as the magical source of States and Recluse’s powers) and the Battalion were just alien conquerors strong enough to eventually enslave the Khelds as fuel sources instead of Well-collectors. But the genie IS out of the bottle and so the best thing to do is limit the damage by declaring the incarnate system “complete” with its six slots with 4 tiers while your character concept is still somewhere to be seen under the powers the live devs designed to have you grind for like traditional MMO loot drops. Keeping it to one general level shift and two incarnate shifts at least means normal content can be +3 to your level and non-shifted incarnate foes can still be +1 to your level. One passive boost power, one proc effect on your attacks, one nuke, one summon, one PBAoE party buff and one two-minute toggle buff is quite a lot, but a lot still depends on your original build too. I don’t know if that would still be the case if we had been able to grind all the way to a hypothetical four more incarnate slots with how many more incarnate shifts and an “Omega” slot (which should mean “done” except if it HAD kept the doors open they’d have needed an Omega+ slot and then an Omega++ slot to keep the grind going). But we thankfully don’t have to find out because we can at least declare HCs incarnate system done while still weak enough that the Natural origin character can declare that their Ionic Judgement is an orbital ion cannon strike from a Vanguard satellite and the minimal FX Vanguard Lore pets are actual Vanguard troops who teleported in to assist you... and still mostly has to rely on their own abilities to get things done. Let’s beat the Battalion the comic-book way; Cheat and then go back to baseline... in this case meaning no more incarnate tags on new content so it’s just one level shift (the Well no longer needs to pump extra power into you) and the incarnate power levels we have now (not to say there couldn’t be new options for the existing slots... just not more powerful ones).

The correct level for true hardcore is 50 with 0 vet levels and no Oroboros badges; but still having all six incarnate slots equipped with T4s. This means you only played through Dark Astoria once (no repeating the first mission chain dozens of times for Emps/incarnate salvage) and got the rest entirely by grinding for it on repeatable content like iTrials. At least that would be MY definition of hardcore.