What happens when you pass 50 and hit "Incarnate" level?

[Black Talon]

Although I could likely have been a lot clearer, I was expressing some degree of consternation regarding the whole "Incarnate" thing - why the heck this system couldn't be a little more straight-forward is a big head-shaker - but the comments regarding the Devs who put this together were meant to be in the "Too ridiculous to take as anything but stupid comments" category.  Yes, I do believe that the Incarnate thing is somewhat out of whack - at least what individuals have expressed here have indicated this - but I will simply continue to run my guys through their motions and work to somehow - somehow - alter the whole CoH algorithm thing through sheer force of will and restore real justice to this beleaguered city.  Doc Vahz will never break parole again...

 

Maelwys, your to-the-point guideline was much appreciated.  I am likely going to put this to some serious use.

 

Grouchybeast, knowing that there's been some communal agreement regarding the after-50 stuff helps as well.  Hoping this can be navigated somehow without CoH turning into a misery grind.

 

Aurora_Girl, for what it's worth, I have absolutely no intent of starting any conflicts with the current game membership, board members, or the game's original (and current volunteer) Devs/GMs/Mods, and offer all apologies for implied offence.  As stated, I honestly believe that the post-50 stuff could have been managed a hell of a lot differently, but I am still with this game - and will be making the monthly contributions - for the foreseeable future.

[gamingglen]

11 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

You collect $200.

 

I had written this exactly as a reply, then thought I should read ALL the replies first. I couldn't be the only one to think this and I was right.  😄    

[Dazl]

When the game was live I never did much with Incarnates or IO's. However with Homecoming it's worth your time understanding these systems and using them to you're advantage. 

[Maelwys]

9 hours ago, Black Talon said:

I was expressing some degree of consternation regarding the whole "Incarnate" thing - why the heck this system couldn't be a little more straight-forward is a big head-shaker

I completely get that.

I started playing CoH in Issue 6, just after "Enhancement Diversification" hit. Although there was certainly an outcry over ED, back in those days leveling up was very straightforward. There were no Invention Enhancements, no "Pay to Win" powers, no veteran abilities and no Incarnate stuff. There was no Auction house and very little trading of enhancements went on. So once you got to level 50, that was it unless you did the occasional Hamidon Raid and decided to manually set up a trade to swap your Dam/Mez HO with someone else's Acc/Dam HO.

There was even no "real numbers" readout, and the "City of Data" site had yet to come into being (or at least had yet to be widely publicised - this was long before RedTomax and the Titan Network took it on); so people largely had no idea what the powers actually did under the hood, or how close they were to the Damage/Defence/Resistance caps, etc. The general populace didn't really care about numbers or percentages until after City of Villains came out and Stalkers started to be seen roaming the PvP zones (and +Perception caps versus +Stealth caps actually started to matter).

Thems were simpler days, and it was by far the most "casual friendly" era of CoH.

You didn't need a "build planner" like Mids (although Jay Teague's 'Hero Builder' and Joe Chott's 'Coh Planner' were around if you wanted them). People usually just took whatever powers they liked the look of, and then ran a Terra Volta respec or two to pick up Stamina and Hasten afterwards.

...Inventions muddied the waters a LOT.

Things became complicated. Too complicated for a lot of the old crew - if you didn't understand the numbers and have a character build planned out then you always had a lingering sense of inferiority to those that did. And to make matters worse, new inventions kept coming in with every new issue / feature update; which meant that you needed to replan again from scratch or be left behind.

Some people also found it difficult to finance their builds - there was finally a "loot grind" in CoH which had never been there before.

I hate loot grinds. I basically transferred to playing CoH from one of the more grindy MMORPG games (FFXI) and one of the big draws for me of CoH was the lack of a grind. So personally, I financed my own IO builds on Live using a very simple method that involved very little effort from me:

Spoiler

Two level 50 toons on different accounts, standing facing each other up on a pipe in the underground section of Warburg. One had a self-rez on autofire (slotted for recharge to get it down under the 3 minute mark), the other had a PBAoE attack on autofire. Both had some form of "Stealth" running like Hide or a Celerity IO in Sprint. I left them like that in the morning whilst I went off to University/Work, then I came back in the afternoon to harvest whatever level 50 PvP inventions had dropped and sell them on the Auction House. It wasn't uncommon for me to farm a few billion influence a week that way; most of my toons on live sat permanently at the 2-billion influence cap and none of my SG buddies were ever stuck financially. The only trouble I had was low availability of the IOs I wanted on WentWorths.

However I do have something of a fondness for figures and knowing how stuff works "under the hood", so whilst I hated the idea of grinding for it, I loved the idea of getting the most out of a character by repeatedly tweaking their build until I was finally happy with it. I was one of the first people to actually make a Spines/DA Scrapper which was self-sustaining for Endurance Recovery (long before Incarnate Abilities made it easy) just by "frankenslotting" inventions, and it got me hooked. So I followed each update very closely and made friends with some of the numberheads on the EU forums. I communicated with Matt Bauer (better known as "Mids")  and promoted his new builder on the EU forums when the other character planners stopped getting updates. etc. etc. I became perfectly happy with "Inventions".

Then I basically quit the game shortly after Incarnates came out; that was my definition of a grind fest. I did NOT want to have to spend weeks/months to cap out each character's incarnate tiers by only playing specific types of content. I detest being forced to repeatedly "raid" things almost as much as grinding. No thank you.

But these days, Homecoming has made climbing up the Incarnate tiers very achievable. You literally get everything handed to you just for doing the things you're already doing, and you can even email "spares" (in the form of Empyrean merits) to an alt. Plus, the cost of IOs has dropped vastly - so whilst it can be a bit of a grind to finance a full invention build, you can easily pick up a few select IOs that have a big impact on your performance (such as +Regen/+Recovery uniques, the +Defence% and +Resistance% IOs, the Archetype "Procs" and the KB -> KD conversion IOs, etc) just by setting aside a few merits from running story arcs.

I do occasionally have flashbacks to the olden days. The idea has been floated before of creating a sever which doesn't have inventions (or Incarnates). But unfortunately getting enough people on board to actually make playing on such a server fun and enjoyable would be a challenge in itself...

Edited October 5, 2021 by Maelwys

[cotesan]

When you hit incarnate is when the real game begins!

[Grouchybeast]

11 hours ago, Black Talon said:

Grouchybeast, knowing that there's been some communal agreement regarding the after-50 stuff helps as well.  Hoping this can be navigated somehow without CoH turning into a misery grind.

 

On HC, the Incarnate system has had a LOT of the pain taken out of it.  It really does just kind of happen in the background while you play whatever content you like.

 

The thing about Incarnates is that I've always found the actual game content to be good fun to play.  The iTrials and TFs are not too long and have some fun mechanics.  The Dark Astoria solo Incarnate content, grudgingly as it was added by the devs, has an interesting and involving story, and is also quite inventive with the mechanics.  The problem on live was that it was spoiled by being tied into an attempt to bolt a grindy MMO end game onto a game that had absolutely no tradition of that, and where the majority of the playerbase didn't particularly want it.  But, honestly, the content is good!  Try it!

 

(I have a lot of issues with Incarnate powers, but that's another story.  For me, they manage to be both overpowered and boring at the same time.)

[Maelwys]

33 minutes ago, Grouchybeast said:

(I have a lot of issues with Incarnate powers, but that's another story.  For me, they manage to be both overpowered and boring at the same time.)

For me it's pidgeonholing.

There are certain Incarnate abilities that simply eclipse others 99% of the time (Musculature Alpha and Degenerative Interface spring to mind).
The Hybrid slots are almost as bad (Assault being better on basically everything except Pet Classes).
The Destiny slots at least require a bit of thought in terms of picking whatever's more useful to you - Ageless for Recovery, Barrier or Rebirth for mitigation depending on whether you're already Defence capped, Clarion for Mez Protection. I tend to have more than one of those available at T4 and swap them depending on the situation.

The Lore and Judgement slots are all pretty fun though.
Lore pets on live were terribad, but they're a little more balanced with a lot more variety these days. Techncially Void Radial is probably the most overall useful of the Judgement abilities, but if you don't care about the damage debuff then they're basically just "pick whatever you like the look/theme of".

I do tend to build my level 50s with a particular Alpha T4 in mind (since it makes it much easier to save on enhancement slots whilst balancing the numbers properly) but the others are icing. I even get the heebie jeebies if I have to softcap defence by running a Barrier Destiny all the time... 😖

[Bill Z Bubba]

8 hours ago, Maelwys said:

For me it's pidgeonholing.

 

/puts on argument hat

//checks characters

///takes argument hat off

 

Alpha Musc Core

Inter Degen Core ... sometimes Reactive Core if fire is called for

Hybrid Assault Core for scrappers/stalkers/blasters and Radial for everything else.

Lore Carnie Radials cuz Dark Ring Mistresses

Judgement Pyro on 90% of them.

 

Min/Maxers do what they do.

 

As for the system's difficulty? Ummmm... it ain't rocket surgery.

[Riverdusk]

I tend to take intuition more often than musc myself, but then I play a lot of "control" characters.  Still gives you +dam, but also some nice +ctrl.  Also has +range which can be very nice if you use ranged cones.

 

I think reactive interface is technically better than degen against everything except AV's/GM's?  If I already have a good -regen power I go reactive.  Sometimes (most often for MM's)  I go diamagnetic as it can really help out with the pets survivability (although the -regen portion of it is laughable even when max stacked and should probably be tripled to be worth anything).  

 

There are quite a few that are underwhelming though, no argument there. 

[Maelwys]

On 10/6/2021 at 3:56 AM, Riverdusk said:

I think reactive interface is technically better than degen against everything except AV's/GM's?

There are long threads somewhere testing this; but to briefly sum it up:

Reactive is a stacking -2.5% Resistance debuff. 
Degenerative is a stacking -3.5% MaxHP debuff.
Both can stack up to 4 times.

Lets say you're a level 50 Minion, with 430.80 HP:
With 1 stacks = you can either take 2.5% more damage (effective HP becomes 420.2927) or you lose 3.5% of your Hit Points (effective HP becomes 415.722)

With 2 stacks = you can either take 5.0% more damage (effective HP becomes 410.2857) or you lose 7.0% of your Hit Points (effective HP becomes 400.644)
With 3 stacks = you can either take 7.5% more damage (effective HP becomes 400.7442) or you lose 10.5% of your Hit Points (effective HP becomes 385.566)
With 4 stacks = you can either take 10.0% more damage (effective HP becomes 391.6364) or you lose 14.0% of your Hit Points (effective HP becomes 370.488)

Now, there is something to be said for how these debuffs actually function practically in the game.

-MaxHP reduces your overall "maximum" HP value AND your "current" HP value by the same percentage whenever it hits (you can see this happening in reverse in MaxHP buffs such as Frostwork) so if the enemy is at 100% HP whenever it procs, then you'll reduce their current HP by the full amount... but if the enemy is at 50% HP whenever it procs, then you'll reduce their current HP by 50% of the amount, etc. So the actual amount of HP it "removes" from the target (and therefore the effectiveness of this proc) gets lower as the target's current HP drops. 

At this point you might be thinking "Hey Mael, doesn't that mean that if you've already damaged a foe then Reactive becomes better then Degen?"

So lets do the same thing for a level 50 Minion with "half of their HP already gone" (215.4) whenever a proc kicks in:

With 1 stacks = you can either take 2.5% more damage (effective HP becomes 210.1463) or you lose 3.5% of your Hit Points (effective HP becomes 207.861)

With 2 stacks = you can either take 5.0% more damage (effective HP becomes 205.1429) or you lose 7.0% of your Hit Points (effective HP becomes 200.322)
With 3 stacks = you can either take 7.5% more damage (effective HP becomes 200.3721) or you lose 10.5% of your Hit Points (effective HP becomes 192.783)
With 4 stacks = you can either take 10.0% more damage (effective HP becomes 195.8182) or you lose 14.0% of your Hit Points (effective HP becomes 185.244)

So the answer is nope. Degenerative's -MaxHP is still better because the effective percentages remain identical - you'd see exactly the same performance versus a weaker enemy that possessed that lower hit point figure to begin with.

HOWEVER (and this is the very important bit!) there are a lot of things out there that function based on your Maximum HP - basically all self-healing abilities as well as regeneration rate. So Degen's -MaxHP Proc is actually a very good means of debuffing those things... and it is particularly useful on AVs/GMs because there is no such thing as "resistance to Maximum HP debuffs" to reduce the effectiveness of this proc! This means that the same percentage of Hit Points will get removed for every enemy in the game. Unlike "-Regeneration" debuffs, which get resisted like crazy by anything that's worth fighting.

Finally: if you use a Degenerative Proc, then the enemy always lose the same amount of maximum HP regardless of its damage resistances. For comparison, Resistance debuffs get resisted by whatever your current Damage Resistance is - meaning that if you're fighting things on a Claws Scrapper (for example) and a Reactive proc kicks in, then your attacks will start dealing 2.5% more Lethal damage than you were previously dealing, regardless of whether the enemy is 90% resistant to your Lethal damage (e.g. a 1000 damage attack used to deal 100 damage, so now it deals 102.5 damage) or 0% resistant to your Lethal damage (e.g. a 1000 damage attack used to deal 1000 damage, so now it deals 1025 damage).

TL;DR:
Basically Degen is always better, and it becomes FAR better whenever you're fighting things which are resistant to your damage type.


-----


Finally-finally: there is also a bit of difference in the other "Damage over Time" portion of the two procs.

Degenerative deals 0.100 MeleeScale worth of Toxic damage.
Reactive deals 0.125 MeleeScale worth of Fire damage.

Technically Reactive deals more raw damage. But which one of these will be better "in practice" depends on the damage resistances of the enemy you're fighting. The impact of this is usually so minor that Degen's secondary effect wins out.
 

Edited October 19, 2021 by Maelwys

[arcane]

The Incarnate system seems extremely simple and intuitive to me, tbh

[DoctorDitko]

All down to the post-shutdown devs, I guarantee.