I see now that no one responded to this, so I will. I’ve run the DA stuff with my empath and my Illusion/Storm controller–in fact, most of the latter’s Incarnate progress is from DA.
Overall, I think the arcs are quite good. There are some clunky bits, but the whole set (and the finale in particular) are the best in the game for making you feel that you’re a serious Power in the world, especially if you pick the more challenging options in dialog in a couple of places. There are some fun new mechanics in play as well, and your decisions can have consequences in subsequent missions. Pay attention to your mission objectives in the nav bar; something curious might pop up.
In terms of making Incarnate progress, it’s frankly very slow. You can unlock slots and fill them with low-tier powers pretty quickly, but if you’re aiming for Tier 3 or higher using only the DA content, you’re going to be grinding them for a while. On the plus side, you can speed through the first arc very quickly (~12 minutes); a little over half an hour gets you the relevant rewards (a component, 10 threads, and an I-merit or two) for the day. Alternatively, you can work your way through the arcs each week instead of running the same one every day to earn a couple of guaranteed Empyrean merits from Gabriel. (Which brings up a tip–before you start Heather’s arc, go talk to Gabriel and pick up his mission. You complete it by completing the arcs.)
Not quite. He hit 50 fighting Tyrant to rescue Statesman. The defeat of Tyrant pushed him over, which is about as epic a way as was possible then. I think Culex was on Plagatus with us.
I have seen the lower level changes a lot on my alts and never noticed the differences, even when switching over and leveling on a higher level. You miss a lot with lousy graphics in the game. But now that I have supported the kickstarter I was saving too much money for, I can start saving for a new system. Although I might go for an Android tablet first. I will get more use out if one of those on the road.
Thanks, Bal - I’ll try to make use of your advice soon.
Lok, thanks for the reminder - I remembered the little entryway room but misremembered it as the one for Infernal’s chamber rather than for Tyrant’s. I do think Plags was there, and I have the impression that we had others (or at least one other) there as well - possibly Dangerosa on Eliza Bennet, her Emp/Energy defender.
It’s been a while since I’ve played in a big group. We had a string of bad experiences with PUGs, usually someone playing a Scrapper who should have been named Attention Deficit Boy. I miss it.
Well it was a bigger deal for me getting to 50 than for the rest of you. Dangerosa may have been there, I’m not sure one way or the other.
I had quite a bit of luck playing on PUGs with the various Incarnate TFs, when I had the time to do so. Even picked up some Master badges on a couple. Haven’t tried any recently, so I have no idea what the new ones are like, or even what changes have been made in the first few.
I took Elvis out for a spin; I’ve finished the Mender Ramiel arc, and I earn xp for my Alpha Slot, but I can’t see a progress bar. Where the heck is that? I recall it being associated with the Incarnate Powers UI, but I can’t recall where.
I would love to get into the Incarnate stuff but it just seems like a lot of busy work to make your character stronger so you can run more Incarnate Content so you can make your character stronger so you can run more Incarnate content and so on…
Some of it’s nice to have for regular content. A Tier 3 Alpha at the very least does wonderful things for your character.
But you’re right, most of it isn’t necessary unless you want to play in the Incarnate stuff. If you get more satisfaction out of optimizing your IO build or starting a fresh character, you’re not missing out by not doing Incarnate stuff.
Agreed! I have been wanting a Zig prison escape event since I first entered that zone with my first character and a real arc in Kings Row is another long time request by me fulfilled.
I got on for a few hours Saturday night. Working my way slowly through the DA arcs, but it looks like some of them are set after Incarnate trials. I didn’t see some of the contacts mentioned.
Yes, they are set after some of the earlier trials, though I don’t think they assume you’ve done them. There are also small variations in dialog and such if you’ve done certain Praet arcs–I know Domi…er, Praetor Duncan says some different things if you’ve run through First Ward before dealing with her in DA. The series of DA arcs leads into the “Dilemma Diabolique” trial, which is near the end of the Praet storyline.
This video goes over some rumored future power sets (presumably uncovered by people who dig into the game files). Interesting stuff possibly coming up.
Nature Affinity was released. I got it and made a Beast Mastery/NA Mastermind. Still very early but it was the first time I really played in a while and I had fun.
Thinking of making a Water Blast/NA Corrupter next.
I made a heroic Water/Nature Corruptor named Marsh Mistress, and a Praetorian Necro/Nature Mastermind named The Verdant Legion. He’s supposed to be the result of Neuron dumping a batch of “failed” regeneration serum in a field that happened to have a dead body buried under it.
Flaminatrix unlocked her Alpha slot a couple weeks ago, and crafted her first Uncommon incarnate power today
I’ve been annoyed at the devs for a couple weeks because the NCLauncher broke under Mac OS 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Basically, it insta-crashed every time we Mac users tried to launch it. I happened to have Mac OS X 10.7 still installed on an external drive, so for the past couple weeks I’ve had to reboot my Mac from that drive in order to play. But the other day another player in the Mac forums posted a rather complex UNIX command that can be entered in Terminal to launch the game client directly, bypassing the NCLauncher. Still, I hope Paragon can get this glitched fixed sooner rather than later. The UNIX command only works if the client is patched and up-to-date (since the Launcher is required for patching), so if I need to patch I’ll have to boot from the external drive, patch the client, and then reboot back to Mac OS X 10.8… annoying.
Fun with character names - I love when things work out like this. I have a number of characters who hail from countries other than the USA, so when I come up with their “secret identity” names I do a bit of research to pick a suitable name from their native countries.
So I have a French character whose hero name is Flavie Faker (Ill/FF controller). Flavie is a French name that means “yellow hair” (and indeed, I gave her yellow hair). She’s part of another one of my “concept” groups, and all of the characters have alliterative two-word names that combine their first names with another word that relates to their powers. i.e. Tabitha Target (archery), Betty Beatdown (war mace), Raisa Razor (claws), Energy Ellie (energy blast), Kinetic Keisha (kin melee), etc.
So I got around to looking for a last name for Flavie Faker, and found a list of French surnames and what they mean. I wanted to continue the alliteration theme, so was looking at surnames starting with “F”, and I found “Fournier” which means, roughly, “from the oven”, and is effectively the French equivalent of the English name “Baker”. Which rhymes with “Faker”. I thought it was cool how that worked out.
It’s almost as clever (IMHO) as something I picked up on in ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s “Fat”, his parody of Michael Jackson’s “Bad”. In “Bad”, there’s a part where Jackson says, “Jam on, jam on”, and Yankovic replaces that with “Ham on, ham on”. I was listening to “Fat” one day and realized that the Spanish word for “ham” is spelled … “jamón”
Dangerosa may have been there, I’m not sure one way or the other.