Lazarillo

I occasionally play a vampire Illusion/Savage Dominator. It's pretty outside the box, but feels like a nice mix with the sort of feral blood-crazed creature in the secondary (including a heal that isn't explicitly draining life, but is based on lusting for blood), with some dark magic-y feeling stuff. Ravens, confounding visions, etc, all feels in spirit. Maybe Mind instead of Illusion if you want something a little less...flashy.

On Everlasting, MoKeyes have a team of cycling Incan-ers to ensure the team avoids the green stuff, so that everyone can earn the badge, Avoids the Green Stuff. They typically test check before the run starts to make sure everyone's got auto-accept on so that the strategy can work.

I read this, thinking, "I bet all they did was add the purple bit, and everything else was originally the same". Then I checked the original Paragon Wiki (which is still up in archive form). That's exactly what they did, just plugged in the bit about Statesman being killed. Everything else is the same. They did that in various places across the game, just kinda throwing in halfhearted bandaids for the sake of whatever weird thing was behind that idea.

The Knives of Artemis are one of the deadliest groups of mercenary combatants in the world. It is rumored that they number no more than 100, but no one is certain. Masters of stealth and reconnaissance, they are highly skilled with all weapons, but the crossbow is their signature. To that end, I maintain we absolutely need one for defeating 100, with a description along the lines of "Though the true number of Knives of Artemis in the world is unknown, you're pretty sure you've taken every member down at least once." And a second for defeating 100 in a single mission, maybe something like "Definitely more than 100. You checked."

Actually, story is a big reason for the difference between the two, to the point there's a reason I really like the ITF, and think the ASF is some of the poorer content the game has to offer. The ITF is made to be a TF in terms of story. Almost all the critical storytelling is in quick blurbs that fit into ambush lines, mission objectives, or even better yet, shows a mastery of visual storytelling (coming round the corner and seeing...those robots in mission 3). The ASF, by contrast, is something that in terms of story really wants more to be an SSA, basically impossible to follow if you're not the leader and getting the big, long info dumps and talking to all the NPCs. And then in terms of mechanics, it wants to be a raid, having complex mechanics (often which are not as well-explained as they would be in typical Incarnate trials). It honestly feels like a crash course in how not to do a Task Force, while the ITF in its classic form, is more or less the perfect distillation of putting one together, from the development side.

I mean, what kind of third-rate vampire has a reflection?

So you're specifically focusing on playing only content where Shards don't drop, complaining they don't drop, and then claiming that's a reason that they shouldn't drop in any other content as well? ...so that means that that nobody should get them ever, and nothing should be done to compensate for the lack of them? To be clear, I'm not necessarily knocking people for going "this is too complicated I don't want to do it". I think PAPs are complete waste of time, but I don't advocate for them to be removed just because I think it's a dumb system. Since as it is, you can ignore Shards if you don't want them, why not do that, and let the people who want to engage with that system, do so? Nor am I necessarily insisting that the current system needs to stay. Simply that any "solution" shouldn't add grind for no reason. If Shards are taken out, then Threads should be increased to compensate for what could be done before their loss. If Notices are taken out, then E-Merits should as well.

Whereas by the time the other slots are unlocked, I often already have t3s for Lore and Destiny already crafted from my Emps and Threads, and also have a t3 alpha from Shards and Notices. I mean, that seems clear enough (not just from this thread, but I see it in Help chat a lot too). Lots of people wasting way more time because they don't want to pay attention. But I don't really see a reason to remove the advantage from people who do. Granted: ...this is closer to me anyway most of the time, because frankly, even with Shards, I find the late game too grindy. So you're hurting me less than you probably think you think you are. But I do think it's unfortunate that I don't get to see well-oiled teams working together as much, so I am a little saddened by the idea of having even less of an excuse to play "live".

But 26 levels you don't have to do to finish your build. You could play an alt (or use those 26 levels to fund an alt, giving you more time you could be playing your main). Anyone who plays this game grinds, to some degree or another (unless, I guess, they just play on Beta only and auto-completes every build). "Playing for fun" doesn't mean you're not grinding it. If you had no intent on finishing your build, why do any Incarnate-ing at all?

Sure: How many Vet levels? Because assuming the typical drop rate for threads, those 135 shards that you wasted by ignoring would've gotten you "fully T4'd out" around with about 14 fewer Vet-levels worth of grind. What it comes down to is pretty simple: Removing Shards without increasing threads increases grind. Period. Full stop. You are taking out a drop and replacing it with nothing. Just because you don't take advantage of it doesn't mean that the extra work you force on yourself should be forced on individuals who make better use of what's given to them.

And yours ignores, once again, that relative to the cost of the components they're used for, Shards drop at effectively the same rate as threads, sometimes even better, depending on the content (and in fairness, sometimes threads drop at a better relative rate than Shards, too, though in both cases, that's only for very specific content...99% of the game, they drop at equal ratios according to their value). When Common-Uncommon components only cost 4-12 Threads, and Rare-Very Rare only cost 1-2 E-Merits, then the ratio would matter. If you want to drop shards from the game, then that ratio needs to be accounted for. If the issue is with shards rendered obsolete faster, then don't tie it to drop rate, I suppose, but rather, Vet levels as well, and make each one that gives threads give about 50% more, and that would also account for the waste from flat out removing an alternative path (and maintain the 10 E-Merits per WST for equivalent ratio on the rares).

This is kind of a misconception of itself, because it doesn't treat the Incarnate system as, well, a system. Saying something is only good for Alpha ignores the fact that any Threads or E-Merits wasted on something that could be done with a Shard alternative, also means you don't have them towards work on another slot.

There's definitely some balance in it depending on content you're running. If you're doing DA or trials, you don't get shards at all. If you're doing Hami, you get a ton more shards. If you're doing basically anything else, it's a 5:1 ratio (as lemming noted), but with the thing you're getting five of also having 1/5 the value. You'd also need a hell of a lot more E-Merits to even things out there, too. You can get a Rare component for 1 Notice, and a VR for 2 notices + shards. If you replace Alpha components with E-Merits, you'd need 36 to fully complete the slot, which means a weekly (and Morty Kal) should award no less than 9 but no more than 11 to continue matching the current "goal" of four weeks to complete the slot.

You get common salvage for 4 shards or 20 threads, and uncommons are 12 shards or 60 threads. So one shard = five threads, for the purposes of "buying" the salvage.

As noted, sure, you get threads 5 times as often as shards, assuming you're doing regular content. But Shards are also five times more useful. If you're just farming Heather or something, then yeah, you'll get threads a lot faster, and to some degree, it's worth it to blow threads on an Alpha slot early to make some of the endgame stuff easier, but if you waste threads on Alpha, it's gonna take a lot longer to finish the other slots.

The difference of losing Shards. Right now, you earn enough shards from drops for a common buy about as fast as you earn enough threads for the same. So to make up the difference of removing shards, you'd need to earn enough threads from drops for two commons.

Sure, as long as Threads start dropping something like twice as often to make up the difference, and WSTs give 10-ish Emp Merits.

Good luck Wayback-ing the old archived forums to find the answer, but I'm damn near certain this was actually confirmed at the time. People asked why there was a Kheldian in Praetoria and got a dev response basically saying "uh, duh, she's not a Kheldian, those are just energy blasts that she gets because she's an NPC and they get unique stuff that players don't".

I'll note that widespread use of PPMs was a Homecoming thing, rather than a Paragon Studios thing. PPMs were an experiment that came fairly late in the game's original lifetime, in very limited scope, as sort of an experiment to see if they'd do better than the flat-percentage system, which caused people to kinda forego the "intent" of procs. HC decided to go ahead and expand the system to all procs (except one) to encourage people not to minmax around proc builds and...well, that's where the bwahahahaha! comes in.

Probably not, but to be clear in this case, the Defiant Barrage proc doesn't work in any power in any meaningful way.

First character I ever considered my "main", back during the game's original lifetime (starting around i5 for reference), was a Claws/Invulnerability Scrapper. I liked the concept but wasn't a big fan of the animations, particularly with Follow-Up, which had a weird slowness to it. When Dual Blades came out later, I changed to DB/Invuln instead and generally had a grand old time. However, when HC came around, I kinda decided some of those animations (notably 1,000 Cuts) now were kinda unappealing, and the Claws ones didn't seem so bad. So I swapped back, this time as Claws/Willpower, and man, lemme tell ya, upgrades to the set over the years, and the ability to convert Shockwave's KB to KD, made me a true believer. The biggest frustration now is the degree to which it feels like nothing else measures up.

It's always worked this way on HC. It did not in days of yore, but I'm not sure if it was a change made very late in the game's original lifespan, or very early in HC's (or in the intervening time when what became HC was hidden away). Guess I could go fight some Carnies on Rebirth or something, and see what they're like there. That'd maybe give some insight into the exact "when" of it all.

Other way around. It would be very easy, just would mean a player never pushed themselves while playing the character.

To be honest, I found Valeria kind of a confusing mess. Some of that I chalk up to maybe being intentional, because time travel to/from times we might not have traveled to ourselves, was involved? But the very note that I'm just sort of guessing that is part of the reason it'd maybe be nice to see that, I dunno...cleaned up a little? I typically like Nictus stuff, but this one didn't do much for me, FWIW. On a sort of related note about overabundance of narration, btw, I'm curious because when the Doc Aeon SF was released, I (and a couple other people) brought up the idea of creating a "SSA mode" for it, since verboseness, particularly in TFs, is kinda hard to follow, and I don't recall who (mighta been Cobalt?) said it might be worth looking into, but I haven't seen/heard any sort of further murmurs either way. Is that still something even on the table, or is the idea just solidly nope-d at this point?