Team play at 20 – Incarnates and Praetoria

Paragon Studios have now presented an overview of the new City of Heroes update – Issue 20: Incarnates. As already has been seen in some previous announcements, the game will now receive two new instanced missions/events that have some similarities with traditional MMO raids.  Both Behavioral Adjustment Facility and Lambda Sector are continuations of the conflict with Praetorian Earth that the developers has been building and adding to since the Going Rogue expansion. These are specifically aimed at the max level characters who are on the path of becoming Incarnates.

With that comes also a queuing system which seem to be similar to that of World of Warcraft’s Dungeon Finder and also a League interface (League = raid in terms of team set-up).

These Incarnate Trials as they are called are designed to be not too long in time (30-90 minutes), which I think is excellent and very much in line with how the game can be played to a large extent. There  seem to be some mixed opinions on the new challenges introduced and included with these trials – not everyone agrees with the approach taken.

I have not had the ability to test any of these on the test servers, so I will wait and see when it is released.

The content does not only include content for the max level characters though; they also include two new strike/task forces, also with themes in line with Incarnates and Praetoria. What strikes me as interesting here is the level range for these strike/task forces – level 20-40. Many of the older strike/task forces have a somewhat smaller level range, typically 5-6 levels.  You can always be a higher level than the designated level range, but you will be scaled down accordingly. The exception to the small range here is Time’s Arrow, also known as the Imperious Task Force (or ITF) which has a range of 16 levels (35-50).

While the game nowadays rewards players even if they scale down it is also good to see that they open up for a wider range and allowing more player constellations use their powers to their full extent. A welcome approach, I think!

There are some other minor updates mentioned, but the focus of this update is very much on these different pieces of team content. I am looking forward to try all of these!