EarthWyrm

I think my SS/EA brute's Hecatomb set is in Haymaker. Five pieces of it, that is. The sixth (the proc) is in the attack I have on auto-fire to build fury (Boxing).

I like Ghost Widow more than Mu for /Energy Aura. Dark Obliteration is a solid AoE damage power, and if you're not able to hit the soft cap, Darkest Night is an absolute house. Gloom is also well worth it if you can fit it in, both as an attack and as a place to stick a set of Apocalypse. I don't use Apoc on mine, because the 6-slot Thunderstrike was more helpful in getting to the soft cap and I already had more +recharge than I needed. I do have Ragnarok in Dark Oblit, though.

Since money is no object, I'd recommend building for the soft cap in addition to purpling. It can be done. Don't feel like you have to use full sets of LotG to get there, either. A lot of my powers I never went past 3 LotGs in.

SS/EA pushed to its limits is a ton of fun. I'm probably close to 2000 hours on mine.

In answer to your other question about 5 or 6 purples, I almost never go past 5. Especially with /Energy Aura, if you can get to the soft cap (which is very do-able, with no budget restrictions), you won't get hit often enough for the Toxic resistance to matter a whole lot.

I laughed. =)

I get the impression that marketing loves data. While you're getting some good suggestions here, have you considered distributing a brief survey to current players querying on websites they frequent, publications they read, and so forth, that might allow you to hone in on optimal markets to attract more excellent people like the ones we already have? (Embedded assumptions are numerous. Feel free to frown at them. They don't go away, but frowns at least make them feel self-conscious.)

What's the over/under on how long it takes P_P to find this thread?

I've found that "Footloose" will kill almost any song I get stuck in my head. I once had Alan Jackson's "Chatahootchee" (or however you spell it) stuck in my head for over a week because it was on continuous loop at the store where I worked. "Footloose" killed it dead.

I was also wanting to comment on this. The reality of most of the purples is that there's a pretty large amount of variability in selling price. If you can sell the purple for 350m (listed for somewhere around 341m, of course) and then put in a bid to buy the exact same one for 250m after your sale goes through (it's not uncommon for me to see that much spread within a lot of the desirable sets), then you end up with exactly the same item, plus 65m profit after fees.

I realize this comes close to recommending "ebil flipping," but to me it's just smart resource management. If you were telling people to buy at 250m and sell at 350m, that'd be different - mainly. But when I get a purple, I always look at the spread of sale values to see if I can end up (in 7 days or less, usually) making this kind of profit and still having the original item in-hand. The answer is "Yes" surprisingly often.

While it would be a nice QoL feature, I suspect this is unlikely because it has the potential to trivialize the badges associated with selling on the market. SCR* applies to any statement about the ability for the badge tracking system to differentiate sales to other players on the market from sales at the insta-sell price. For all I know, pohsyb has already figured that one out, though.

* = Standard Code Rant

Claims thread has not reached critical silliness levels yet.

Summons Hickman.

Gratuitous self-quotation to complain about negative reputation received for being a "long-winded d-bag".

Needless quotation of entire OP.

Excessively long and verbose analysis of OP, couched in pseudo-academic language and utilizing compound-complex sentence structure destined to leave other posters completely uncertain of the point you were making, other than that you took the OP far too seriously. Stylistic quirkiness that indicates the possible presence of a Strunk-and-White fetish.

Posturing and unverifiable assertions of knowledge and authority.

You're welcome. I also appreciate your answer, which seems to be, "I just choose to ignore it."

So you missed the part where Donna was told that it probably wouldn't work because no single person could completely cut off supply for most items, and would inevitably get undercut by other people who do things like post their items for 222 and allow the lowballers to get what they want for less than the going rate?

Or did you just choose to ignore it?

The fact that people can come up with plans for how to make inf or corner the market does not mean they will work. Most such plans, if you've followed the market forums at all, result in a loss of inf.

I think you've demonstrated quite a bit of imagination in this thread, yes.

True story. When we got the ability to roll Bronze thru the MA, things started hitting the redside market that almost never hit the redside market and were horrifically overpriced as a result. Specifically, Basilisk's Gaze Acc/Hold and Acc/Rech, which had both been going for 50-100m at level 30 because they were in such short supply, suddenly became obtainable. I hit one of those the first day, looked at the number bidding, looked at the rising number for sale, and realized that it was going to drop pretty quickly to 20m or below as supply shot through the roof compared to what it had been.

So I crafted the one I got with my tickets and listed it for 17m. I'd have been happy with 20m. I logged in the next day to see that it had sold for 100,000,000.

True ebilness is not asking for the most. True ebilness is figuring out how people are going to bid and pricing your item lowest so that if somebody does come in and offer up a ridiculous amount, you get the sale. The only time I price something at or above the last 5 is when there are no others for sale. Otherwise, I'm all about undercutting the competition while making sure that I get at least what I want.

Agreed, would love official confirmation on this as well.

I actually find most of them (the notable exception being Dr. Aeon in the STF) completely immersion-breaking, since they provide information the characters would never have access to. I'm all for the addition of the ability to create these to the MA, though, provided the MA interface is updated to warn players that the arc may contain cutscenes. As long as people who don't like them can avoid them, adding them becomes a win-win.

Yes, you can do that. One in each of Hover/Maneuvers/Weave would work just fine.

I think that's true of all of us.

But not for the same reason that it would necessarily be beneficial to you. If you made assumptions about how other people play the game, it's natural that people will offer up reasons why those assumptions might lead to unintended consequences. It's not about demonizing you as an individual. I hope you can see that. There are a lot of folks with game design and player management experience who've seen what open systems such as what you describe can do to a game.

This is the part that I personally never quite got, based on my own playstyle. I don't delete mid-level IOs. I just don't have a burning sense of, "Must eke out the last few % from every power" that requires me to change out my level 33-35 set IOs for level 50s. I have plenty of characters wandering around with 2-3 purple sets in one group of powers, and a set of 5 IOs from the early 30s when they were originally slotted in another power.

But that's a playstyle issue. Would I pull those out and replace them with level 50s if I could? Maybe. (Actually, it's more likely that I'd replace with 49s, given that the difference from 49 to 50 is decimal dust and the cost to buy and craft 49s is usually < 50% of the cost to do the same with 50s.) And if I did pull out those mid-level IOs, I don't know that they'd end up on the market, since odds are I'll eventually have another alt that needs them. So not only do I not end up putting stuff on the market (not increasing supply), I also now have an upcoming character that doesn't need to use the market to get what he or she wants (reducing demand).

Again, though - playstyle issue.

That is, unfortunately, true of almost any system you can imagine. If there is a way to "game" it, people will do so. The path of least resistance is prohibitively attractive.

And again, none of this is meant as an attack on you; the idea simply had the potential for abuse, implemented as suggested. Bringing it here and offering it up for critique was the best way to have any potential problems identified.

I keep reading through this thread and thinking, "Man, there's gotta be something I can say that would be constructive and demonstrate the core problems with the system being proposed that hasn't already been said." But then I find something like this, that really gets into the psychology and player retention aspects of why the change would not be good, long-term, for the game, and I realize I couldn't possibly have said it any better.

You know what would be great?

If that wasn't a bug. If the Rikti in these invasions had some sort of "temporary Riktification" power that functions similarly to confuse and causes random PCs to appear as enemies.

Okay, that by itself wouldn't be great. But if it went along with a chance for anyone who gets temp Riktified to get a PvP drop when they get summarily squished by everyone around them, that'd be kinda funny - and would help work more of a really really really rare commodity into the game.

I'm no fan of forced/random PvP, but Rikti tech that makes PCs appear to be enemies (and even better, if the character in question had their name Riktified when they got hit with it) would be fairly story-consistent (get beaten down and it stops the transformation), and the possibility of a reward for getting smacked silly in a no-debt environment would be entertaining - to me, at least.

Do we have any verification that the Boss-drop version of this is weighted in the same fashion as when you roll randomly? It's never seemed that way to me. I've gotten a distribution of boss drops that seems pretty randomly spread, rather than being weighted toward the damage sets, though I will admit that the sample I'm basing that statement off of is pretty small. For example, I've done a lot of random rolls since the weighting change was put in, and haven't gotten a single Trap of the Hunter proc - but I've gotten one from a boss. And a Gaussian's R/E. Ghost Widow triple. Ghost Widow proc. Glimpse of the Abyss triple & proc. From damage sets I've only gotten procs from Posi and Obliteration and a Decimation triple, that I can think of. I question the assumption that boss drops are using weighted versions of the tables, until more data can be gathered.

That being said, I'm confident that if a redname has said the weighting is applied to boss drops, if anyone can provide a link it would be you.

Not in any fashion I've been able to divine over the past year, either via "feel" or real numbers. Although the 3-slot bonus for WG at least helps some, if memory serves. 6% is better than nothing, if you've got the slots and are full up on the 7.5 GotA specials.

I've had that problem all but one time I've run the SF (of course, I've only run it about 5 times). I know people who routinely send in a petition that they are stuck as soon as they start the mission, figuring that by the time they clear the map support will have shown up to help with any missing mobs.

I don't recommend that approach, but then I've never had to wait more than 20 or 30 minutes for a response to a petition about being stuck in that mission. I wonder if we invoke the name "War Witch" our wonderful goddess of maps-n-such will hear our call and take a look at the potentially troublesome spawn points in that mission, or forward the concern on to the person who's currently on map duty...

Well, not if *I* do it. I suspect she has me on /ignore (rightly so) for being a tool about the AE building in Croatoa. Someone else might have better luck.