Zombra

Thanks. I was thinking the same thing. Just sad because I've never run this arc before and I wanted to do it "right" the first time 😢

Hi, I started the Vincent Ross arc, where he tells you at the beginning that you can choose an ally. I wanted to wait until I was done with Diviner Maros' arc to start this, so I sat on it for a while. Then by accident* I agreed for Lorenz Ansaldo to be my support for the first mission. *I was told to speak with him during a different mission and got confused when the Ross mission text popped up. Realizing my mistake, I tried abandoning the Ross mission, but it only went back to the previous state. Now the Ross mission says I can choose a support person, but my Clues still say that I already picked somebody. I really want to just start the whole thing over, but there is no option to Abandon, only to Complete which I don't want. Any advice? Thanks!

This was even tougher for a female character, but I think I did okay. Doesn't have to be perfect because she's a spy doing her best trying to disguise her way into Wyvern territory, did the best with what she could scrounge. Thanks to everyone above, y'all helped a lot for me to even get this close 🙂

Full disclosure, I was really trying to find out if there is a pet anywhere that looks like a Banished Pantheon floating spirit mask to complete a concept of mine, but I guess there isn't one under vanity or Incarnate Lore. Maybe someday!

Is there an updated list somewhere of all the vanity pets, and where you get them? I can't find the Anniversary Event Vanity Pets listed anywhere on the web. Makes me think I'm missing out on others that might be out there somewhere.

It's the same 10 cops over and over. You thought we were the only ones who use the medical teleporters to zerg missions?

Thinking about Warshades, they probably have a pretty tough time, since PBs can sense "Nictus energy" and a Warshade is simply a Nictus who isn't an asshole - they are physically the same, right? Presumably they will set off the PBs' "Nictus Sense" which will lead to a lot of suspicion and misunderstandings.

Thank you once again @Greycat for your expertise and thoughtful responses. Warning, long post of me trying to sound out my thoughts and see if they look right on the page. I'm going to try to put some information together and speculate about answers to my questions about merging and selection. • Kheldians have been around on Earth for thousands of years (at least). • New Kheldians show up from time to time, whether immigrants or native born (we don't know), but their population is still really low, less than a thousand on the entire planet. • There are Nictus here too, but the two sides are not in open conflict except during the Moonfire TF. At one point Moonfire admits she's not even 100% sure there are any Nictus on Earth, but this doesn't really make sense since she knows about Arakhn. • Most Earthbound Kheldians are fused to human hosts, but some are unfused. • Unbound Kheldian lifespans are very short. • There is a thing called the "Peacebringer Army" that keeps an eye on the Council. This does not seem to be the entire Peacebringer population so presumably there are "civilians". Since there are less than a thousand PBs total on Earth the PB Army can't have enough soldiers to really be an army, but it could be hundreds. • Moonfire says that Peacebringers are resolved to destroy all Nictus. She seems to be speaking for all PBs everywhere. This could be hyperbole but it feels true. • "Nictus Energy" can be sensed by Peacebringers. • Kheldians came to Earth "because of the [Kheldian] war". Whether it was to fight here or escape the war is unclear. • Sometimes an unbound Kheldian will pick a totally random person and ask to bond with them, when they are like seconds away from dying and have no other option. This is how Moonfire came to be. Seems like a real dick move but hey, aliens can be weird. • Pretty much all of this is supposed to be kept secret from humanity, for no stated reason. Maybe not all of the above is relevant, but this is the picture I see being painted: Kheldians are a tiny, hidden minority on Earth, who are worried about Nictus being around but aren't sure and can't definitely locate them. To me the vibe is that the Nictus were here first; their deal seems to be that they wanted to seed Earth with cysts, make more Nictus, bind with humans, make more Nictus, etc. to build up numbers for the war. The PBs followed and have been fucking up those plans. We are probably talking a few dozen at most on each side in the earliest days; think less like an army and more like teams of spies. Nowadays there are hundreds of PBs and maybe the Nictus ranks have also increased. Some PBs know about Arakhn and the Council and are keeping an eye on what's up on Striga, but because Striga is crawling with thousands of Council soldiers they can't just attack head on. What does all this mean for the decision making process around merging with humans? With all this in mind, what is the baseline origin for a Peacebringer player character? I feel like many Earthbound Peacebringers live with worrying about the Nictus every day, but don't see an obvious plan of action. They may or may not know about Striga but aren't exactly sure what is happening there - maybe nothing - and there's no clear target. Maybe some aren't aware of Arakhn or her history. Maybe there's a "cold war" feel where it's like "The Communists are out there ... somewhere". So they want to be ready to defend themselves but only some are truly informed and organized (the PB Army). In any case I feel like most PBs don't want to be in a vulnerable Light Form body when the Nictus could be behind every bush, so whenever a newborn matures enough to merge, or whenever an adult arrives from outer space, they will want to get a strong human body as soon as they can, just to be ready for the fight whenever it happens. Like cold war nuclear preppers who got their fallout shelters all set for the bombs to drop. I'll call these the "Typical" Peacebringers. But there are also what I'll call the "Atypical" Peacebringers, like the "old man" Light Form 10 year old who never bothered to get a host and randomly asked a French art student to merge just before it died. This guy couldn't have been very serious about being ready every day for a Nictus attack. Atypicals presumably hate the Nictus too but probably don't think there even are any on Earth. They are less hyped to support the war effort. I think the Typicals are most of the PBs you see out there, and that this would be the default philosophy of a "serious canon" player character PB crimefighter. They could either be older Kheldians who have seen the war in other galaxies and recently arrived on Earth, or fresh youngsters born here. Either way they will look for a strong human who is sympathetic and unafraid of the prospect of war, probably gravitating towards danger-facing professions such as police, soldiers, emergency responders, and even superheroes. Conversely, Atypicals will account for sillier and less thought out concepts - Kheldians who are out of touch with the events around Striga and don't care about eradicating Nictus energy, whose backstories don't touch on the lore at all and just want to squid around.

OK, I'm still putting together information. My big thought experiment is still coming up but before that it would help a lot to know: Do we ever see "unattached" Kheldians in game? Are there lots of loose energy blobs out there who don't have a host yet? Is there any talk about 'refugees' who are looking for hosts? Or can we assume that Kheldians on Earth never stay unattached for long? I did read the mention of Unbound Nictus that you see come out of Shadow Cysts. If this is the only time we see unbound Khelds that has big implications for how, when, and how often bonding takes place. Oh another question, when a bound Kheldian host physically dies* for whatever reason, does the Kheldian "energy form" emerge like a ghost, to go bind with someone else (or itself be blown to bits by an energy beam, or eaten by a Nictus)? That's kind of how it seems. Do we know anything different? *Not to be confused with being defeated and going to the hospital 🙂 Looking forward to any clarification from fact experts .. @Greycat I'm hoping to hear from you!

You're both right ... but imo @Shenanigunner is more right. The information is there, but hidden if you don't already know where to look. If I disregard vague memories from 20 years ago, here in 2024 I levelled a non-Kheldian from 1-50 without seeing any mention of Kheldians whatsoever, except the ATs in character creation that say "Yo, these are aliens" and Sunstorm loitering in Atlas Park saying "Yo, I'm an alien." Never saw anything else. The game absolutely does not tell you what Kheldians are until you are already playing one, which is too late for someone who wants to create a character from scratch with a canon-friendly concept. Go, hunt, squid around is indeed all the info I've received in game. EDIT: actually I remember that the Galaxy soldier description may have the word Nictus in there. So that counts as a mention I guess but is hardly informative. Actually I'm not sure I saw a single thing from 1-50 that told me that the Nictus and Kheldians are related in any way 😄 With that out of the way, I want to thank @Greycat x1,000,000 for the super awesome link with all the collected lore! Also thank you @GM Crumpet for more solid lore info, and thanks to everyone in the thread for their thoughts character concepts which have given me some good perspective. In my next post I'm going to ask a clarifying question I'd love opinions on, but I don't have time right this minute. 🙂

Oh I could certainly make up my own cool ideas if I wanted to 🙂 First I am trying to figure out the canon (if any!) Gotta learn the rules before you can responsibly break them.

Sort of, but comic book writers make some effort to make a hero unique, or so rare or improbable that the character is fascinating. Being the one person on Earth to be selected to wear the Green Lantern ring is interesting. Going to 7-11 and buying one isn't. I feel like the Kheldians are hanging out at 7-11 to merge with whoever walks by. Am I wrong? Nothing I can find implies otherwise. A character's personality and motivation are certainly interesting questions, but this is not an origin story. "Superman chooses to fight crime" isn't enough. Now we're getting somewhere. The story of how somebody became fused can be interesting - except again, I have no examples to work with and no background on how it's usually done. They've been around for thousands of years fusing with people and it feels like it's a completely un-special process, like buying that ring at 7-11. Is there a selection process? Is only one person chosen every 1000 years, or can anyone join whenever? Do the Nictus target particular people to force merge? Maybe they want scientists, or exceptional physical specimens? I don't know and nobody seems to know, and there's no evident difference between a Kheldian who used to be a sick child and one who used to be a bodybuilding champion, so I have nothing to work with. Why would a Nictus force merge with someone anyway? Look at how many people apply to be astronauts in the real world. I don't think it would be hard to find people on every street corner who would jump at the chance to get super powers. Again, if there were canon backstories that showed any kind of pattern in how these people come together, any sense that getting a Green Lantern ring is special in any way, it would give me a starting point. I guess there just isn't one, so my character will just go to 7-11, except he won't because to me that's not a story worth telling. Thanks for your thoughts.

Hi again! I've been wanting to try playing a Kheldian again (I had one back in the day), but it's really rough trying to make sense of a character concept. I looked at the wiki for most of the lore, and here are the basics of what I've gathered (and haven't gathered). There are these aliens from space, at war with other aliens from space. They don't have bodies - they're just life energy or something. Some of them feed on life energy so they kill each other by sucking it out. They can get bodies by merging with hosts from other planets, including three main races. Humans, space squids, and space lobsters. Individual Khelds you see on the street have merged with one, two, or all three. They have been on Earth for thousands of years. They have never kept their presence a secret but no one talks about them really at all, it's no big deal. They don't have any kind of embassy, or relationship with human governments. There are just some of them kind of standing around Paragon City asking superheroes to help them fight the other aliens. There is no formal system for acquiring host bodies. No one has any idea how potential hosts are selected, how they are asked, whether people try to seek out Kheldians to merge with them, or what that process looks like at all. Sometimes there are just these disembodied aliens and sometimes they end up merging with people. Like, you know how sometimes you'll find a horse tangled up in a fence? It's kinda like that - sometimes you'll find a soul sucking spirit alien who merged with a human being. It doesn't happen much, except when it does, and then you see one and people are like "Welp, there's one of them whaddayacalls." This is all rather unsatisfactory in terms of trying to make a lore-friendly Kheldian character with a sensible and interesting backstory. It just seems like it's going to be "Joe Blow was going to work one day and some alien on the street asked him to merge into a superbeing and he said yah ok bro" Am I missing important information about their deal? Any insight appreciated.

I tried Renewal of Light and not only do you float up in a halo of holy light, you actually sprout angel wings for a moment as you do it. Maybe fine for very certain characters buuuuuut not appropriate for most of mine. I haven't seen the special effects of Return to Battle yet.

Kind of a for fun question 🙂 So what ARE Incarnate summons? I mean, I know they're pets, and the in-game description says "This essence has been conjured out of the mists of the Well of the Furies, a study of an enemy made substance and brought to heel." But is it, like the soul of a dead person? Or maybe several souls mixed together into a generic archetype? A soulless composite of a concept born from our collective semiconscious maybe? (If so, why would I summon an enemy? Why not the idea of "justice personified" or something?) A projection of my own fears? A blueprint of a "training dummy" turned outwards? What are your thoughts? I'd love to know if there is an official explanation but don't be afraid to share your own theories.

This is all true, but I still miss the old days "normal" speeds. And don't get me started on how many IO sets I can't slot because they make you even faster.

I'll never say no to Health and Stamina, but I don't like all my characters being Olympic level track and field stars. In many cases Swift and Hurdle make it more difficult to precisely position in combat.

You're still wrong. This was not an isolated brain fart. There is a consistent pattern of intelligent people complaining about the bad design of this system (or rather, the UI and framing of the system). Some people, perhaps many, "get it" quickly and good for them. That does not mean that it is objectively easy. No designer should congratulate themselves because "only" 40% of users find their system a huge pain in the ass. I'm not especially interested in your motivations, but you should be aware that I can't find any apparent purpose to your previous post, other than to say that anyone who struggles with the system must be stupid because it is so easy. So yes, regardless of your intent, that came across as very disrespectful. Now you know.

I mean, sure ... if you put it like that, it's also easy to beat Kasparov at chess. You just have to move the little pieces around to the right places at the right times. And those little things are so easy to pick up and move around! 😄

Factually wrong. If you were right, then no one would struggle with it; yet I am not the only person who found it confusing.

First, City of Heroes level-ups are done top down for power selection, enhancement slotting, etc. The game itself teaches you to get used to top down for dozens of hours, then changes it for no reason at all. Second, when you open the Skyrim Perk screen, it literally zooms in on the node at the very bottom of the tree. You have to zoom out to see the rest. Skyrim teaches you very blatantly that the list starts at the bottom. Incarnate does nothing like this. I'm not saying that bottom to top is inherently evil, but for the game to assume that all players will assume they should start at the bottom is indeed dumb design.

I didn't say this before, but .. y'all know it's not an actual tree, right? It's a flowchart, which normally go top to down and left to right. Sometimes skill "trees" in games do indeed go down to up or in all kinds of different directions, but it is not unnatural to start looking at the top left.

I appreciate that, and I apologize in return if the hostility in my response was hurtful. As to how exactly Incarnate could be done better, I'm not sure if that's a useful conversation at this point as I doubt anything will be changed. Certainly, anything pointing to Ramiel would be better than what we have now (which is nothing). I would definitely support changing the Ramiel popup to be very explicit about being an important intro to this whole huge endgame system. Right now, the only hint that the Incarnate system exists at all (besides the up-to-now-utterly-meaningless Abilities window) is when you suddenly start getting some weird special xp and notifications of salvage you never heard of before (oh good, more currencies!), with no warning or explanation. This all leads to the vague feeling that you should not only be doing something, but already know what you're doing. You're pushed out of the plane to parachute into enemy territory, but no one even told you what your mission is, much less how to accomplish it. Really, I don't think you should even get Incarnate xp or salvage at all until you've unlocked that storyline. By the way, I also never suggested that the Create menu (or anything) should be changed now - obviously that would cause problems for those already familiar with it. The point wasn't to fix it by flipping it over again - the point was that it was designed in a dumb way in the first place. A problem doesn't have to be "universal" to be bad, and this was done in a way that is bad. In short, you asked "What's wrong with it?" and I am simply explaining what is wrong with it. 🙂 If the Homecoming devs want to have a conversation about changing the intro to Incarnate, I'd be happy to be part of the brainstorm. Until then, the thread has served its purpose as far as I'm concerned - which was no more than for me to be able to start using the system. If the thread can be valuable in other ways or to other people, great; and I'm happy to keep responding to anyone who brings in new ideas or who needs help understanding the point.

This is a ridiculous and frankly insulting comparison. The Inventions tutorial walks you through every menu, shows you where all the buttons are, explains the meaning of every window, and guides you through the actual creation of an IO. The contact to show you the tutorial pops right up in your Contacts window. It holds your hand so tightly the circulation cuts off. Conversely, the Incarnate system never even draws attention to the Incarnate Abilities button - the button is there to be sure, but after spending dozens or more hours levelling from 1-50, it's not that weird to forget it is there at all. Who even looks at their Powers window ... ever? I don't. And once you even find it, opening it up doesn't help much without explanation. The Equip window is not really like anything else in the game, and of course when you open it up you have no powers to slot, so even if you've unlocked the slots, the window contains no actionable information. So right off we're starting with at best a "This makes no sense. Oh well, maybe later it will." Then there's the Create menu - again, the top recipes contain ingredients you literally cannot have at that point, with no way to learn about them unless you (a) happen to notice the pattern in the power names (which I did not for a long time) - or (b) exhaustively search every single one trying to find something recognizable ("Well the first 8 of these make no sense. Come on lucky #9!"). So that's not great. Lastly, we have the Convert tab, which starts off with Shard conversion. Even though I played at 50 for a lot of hours before even finding this window, I didn't have enough Shards to make anything, and I had never seen any of these incarnate salvage types before. I had no idea what any of these things were until I flipped back and forth a few times and saw that some of the powers in Create required some of these salvage types as part of (but not all of) the requirements. Yes, once you finally get to Threads, you probably have enough of them to at least start making some salvage, and yes, by the time I got to this point I was beginning to piece things together in my mind. Up until that point however the entire system was clear as mud. Looking through so many things in a row that didn't make any sense did not make it smooth and easy to finally get to where it did. And let's not pretend that there aren't a ridiculous number of currencies and intertwined loot systems in the game. Maybe I need to spend Merits to access some of this stuff? Do Enhancement Catalysts work into it somewhere? That can't be right. Maybe this has to do with Legacy Salvage I saw in the auction house menus, or maybe I need to be doing very specific Trials or TFs to even think about doing any of this, because I'm pretty sure there's stuff like that out there. Do I even have the pieces I need to start putting this puzzle together? I don't know. It's perfectly possible there are whole systems out there, of which I'm unaware, that I have to engage in to even get the pieces. Yes I figured it out eventually in this case (with minimal but key advice from other players) but as someone who doesn't like to ask for help the learning curve is far, far steeper than it needs to be here. If what you're looking for is you are smart and I am dumb, then fine - I'm happy to admit that I'm dumb, and anyone who figured all this out at a glance is smart. So good, yes, you're very smart. I don't think that invalidates my frustration, or the fact that even without a tutorial, the menus could be laid out in a way that isn't front-loaded with inaccessible jargon, and doesn't require you to start at the end and work backwards to have any hope of unraveling it.

Eh. I'm up for puzzles and mysteries, but that obviously was not the intent here. The designers simply tried to give a clear explanation and failed.