The Incarnate Trials

The City of Heroes’ February producer’s letter brings some details about the new things to come for the Incarnate system with Issue 20 – the Incarnate Trials. These trials are a new type of team-based content, a bit based on the new event system that was introduced in Issue 19. In terms of number of players involved in these trials, the content is close to what people call raids in some other MMOs – in City of Heroes those have been named leagues.

The league sizes are not fixed however; the two first ones introduced are set up for 8-16 players and 12-24 players respectively. To play in  those trials they are also introducing a system which seems similar to the Dungeon Finder (I think it is called so) in World of Warcraft – i.e. you or your team can queue up for a trial wherever one happens to be through the LFT interface and when there are enough people one is transported to an instance for the trial. Trials are designed to be completed  between 30 and 90 minutes.

It is not required for anyone wanting to advance their incarnate abilities to do the trials; they can still do regular content – it will just be slower. It sounds like a good mix of accessibility, somewhat causal-friendly and new content with some challenges.

Another post from Paragon Studios provides some more details about one of the trials, The Behavioral Adjustment Facility, of B.A.F. for short. Looks like it could be fun to try out.

Given that it is City of Heroes 7th birthday in about 2 months time, my guess is that this is the time when Issue 20 will be released and one can try out these trials for real. Good things to come!