Hybrid Incarnate power design philosophy

[Pleonast]

What is the design philosophy for the Hybrid Incarnate powers? To review: they cost no endurance, are toggles, continue 120 seconds at maximum before auto-shutoff, and take 120 seconds to recharge. This seems like an odd choice to me; not the numbers but the toggle, auto-shutoff, and long recharge. I assume there is a reason they were designed that way. I guess they wanted weird powers for the Incarnate system?

[Psyonico]

They are most likely a toggle so that you can't set it to auto fire when it is up.

[Yoru-hime]

Yes, the old devs were bound and determined that there was going to be a buff that you'd actually have to click and couldn't be made permanent. It's a bit of a tortured implementation, but they technically got there.

 

I feel like they never quite forgave players for abandoning the defensive T9s in favor of powers that provided consistent protection. They really, REALLY wanted situational self-buffs to be more of thing than they ever were outside of Build Up. The tendency of players to either make something perma- or just eschew it altogether irked them. They never got that the game usually provides pretty consistent challenge levels within a mission outside of the rare AV/GMs, so an up-and-down protective scheme just doesn't work very well. Either you're too weak to survive in down state or you never needed the up state.

 

Which explains why almost no one takes the defensive Hybrid. 🙂

Edited May 18, 2020 by Yoru-hime
Typos

[The_Cheeseman]

Yep, the above poster pretty much got it. They are intended to be a powerful, situational buff with a strict uptime that is used more thoughtfully than just a "click it whenever it's up" power. The way the powers are designed is to allow an AT to temporarily gain the ability to fill a role on a team that it couldn't normally handle. A Controller can tank for a while with Melee, a Blaster can lockdown MOBs with Control, or a Defender can be an effective blaster with Assault. But you can only do that half the time, hence the name, "Hybrid".

Of course, that's not how anybody actually uses the powers, but that appears to be the clear design intention.