Fulmens

Let's try and get a two-orders-of-magnitude idea what the common salvage market looks like.

I don't know if this will help with "inf destruction calcuations" but when the Luck Charmers were taking control of the entire Luck Charm market in order to free it [... paved with the BEST intentions...] there were very roughly 500 LC's a day going through, on a weekday, heroside. Two or three times that many on a weekend.

Giant guesses that I'm happy to hear better ideas on:
1) Villainside has about 1/3 the volume of heroside
2) Two and a half times as many items of salvage on a weekend as on a weekday (so "ten days a week" of salvage- 5 weekdays, 2*2.5 weekends)
3) four times as many midlevel, and four times as many high level, items of salvage created and sold as low level ones.
4) The average sale price for a piece of common salvage is 10,000 inf. This includes all the spikes to a million, just as it includes all those improvised cybernetics at 10.

RESULTS OF THESE:
For common salvage, our guess is 5000 Luck Charms a week, and about 20,000 Alchemical Silver a week, heroside. So 6250 and 25K counting both sides. There are 12 pieces of low end common salvage, 12 mid-end and 12 high-end: 75K low end, 300K mid and 300K high end per week. 675K items total. At 10K per item sale price, that's 6.75 billion inf per week, which burns 675 million.

So unless I'm off by two orders of magnitude on the low end, a week of common salvage involves spending less inf than a day of one type of purple IO.

Now there are only about ten purple IO's and at least five of them (the sleep, immob, confuse, pet, and stun- maybe the hold too) are relatively cheap .

So saying "One purple set burns ten times as much inf as all common salvage" is not as big a deal as you might think.

If we look at rare salvage- and the big guess here is "Rare and common are generated from tickets in the same proportion as they drop", which is probably wrong- we get roughly 1/25 as much rare salvage as common. Rare salvage goes for highly variable prices- let's pretend the average is 1 million. 675K common salvage/25 = 27K rare salvage a week. 27 billion inf spent, 2.7 billion inf a week burned.

... my numbers may be off by a factor of 2. I was BUYING 500 luck charms a day [with considerable help from the rest of the Conspiracy] and selling an equal number. Hardly anyone flips commons, but for rares there's up to a factor of 2 more inf burned. I don't think anything gets flipped twice, but maybe.

It's back. Billion inf to match, 100 M to a customer, any server any side.

My Drain Psyche experience is that regen by itself won't keep you alive ... and regen that requires you to be in pointblank range of the people you're getting it from? Even less alive.

My Fire/*/Elec experience is that I sometimes had trouble finding a target for the third AOE. Lots of clicking the button while the game tried to find a survivor. So five might SOUND good but I don't think it's really that great an idea.

Fire/Mental is a very good combo- Mental has a damage cone that is also a -Recharge cone. So you get to live two or three times longer if you survive the initial return fire. Mental is just an all-around good secondary.

En/En: My only Energy primary was Fire secondary. Which is a terrible combination, by the way. I didn't like Energy primary, I didn't like Fire secondary, but they may do better matched up with something else. My feeling is that if you shoot a single target repeatedly, they WILL be knocked back. If you throw out an AOE casually, you will probably knock back a few and anger all of them. Single target assassination is a fairly safe way to play an EN blaster.

My wife used to have a "volleyball combo" with an /en secondary blaster: Bonesmasher [knocks down], Air Superiority [knocks up], Power Punch [knocks back, HARD.] Bounce, bounce, SERVE !

Something else to consider about the Sonic primary: It doesn't help THAT much, by itself, but it stacks very nicely with anything else on the team.

I came to Sonic from 100+ levels of Force Field defender. If you're playing FF, nobody touches the team, ever. However, if anyone else on the team has +Defense powers there's a lot of redundancy. Sonic "halves incoming damage", but Force Fields drops it to 10% of original. No more and no less, even if you've got Force Fields, Cold shields, and acc debuffs and a Super Reflexes scrapper.

Almost NOBODY is capped on resistance, ever, so there's always room for Sonic rings. And more damage is always, always appreciated.

As for soloing? I don't know if it's the WORST, as Dr. Mike suggests, but it's close enough to worst that I won't argue. It's bad.

Your primary is damage. Your secondary is mostly damage.

There are no blasters that survive "really well" by the standards you live by. Especially not solo.

At level 35, a SO'd out blaster is 1/6 as tough as an SO'd out scrapper. Roughly.

So what's a blaster to do? Learn, adapt, and improvise. I have a mini-guide in my sig. By the way, someone is going to probably say, at some point in this thread, "Well, get to the ranged defense cap..." (I know, I just did, very meta.) You can't really get signficant defense until, usually, about level 44. It just takes a lot of spare slots and millions on millions of inf.

Learn to kill people very, very fast. It's the ultimate debuff.

When you make up one side of the argument and then argue against it, that's exactly what people SHOULD mean when they refer to a "straw man" argument. (This being the internet, "straw man" is usually used more like "Yer mother." Decline of the youth of today, etc.)

If you linked to a specific thread and said, "For example- here", we could judge your opinions about whether it really happens, whether it SHOULD happen, whether those players are on bad drugs, etc.

As it is, you're basically asking us to defend a position that you've invented for us.

I could do a redside TF tomorrow during the day (Eastern Zone) at some point- finish before 5 PM maybe?

I'd, umm, miss you if you left? Yeah. I would.

Silas is correct, but I'd like to mention that, inevitably, things got slightly more complicated with time.

Used to be "one task force, one recipe." If you did Katie Hannon in 15 minutes or a Dr. Quartermain in 10 hours, still one recipe. So they decided to bite the bullet and make "merits" as a way of balancing it out. So you do a Task Force, you get 9 merits for Katie, something like 112 for Dr. Q. 20 merits buys you a roll on the "Rare Recipe" table (formerly pool C/D) or a few other possibilities, most of which are a complete waste of merits.

At the same time they added the ability to buy specific recipes at specific levels for a very large number of merits (usually around 200 merits)- this is only worth it for a very few, very expensive recipes.

Somewhat later they added "roll weighting" so that you're far more likely to roll a Miracle: +Recharge than you are a Trap of the Hunter: Acc/Rech/Immob . (Of course, there are TWO trap of the hunters in the C/D table and only one Miracle, so you still have lots of ways to lose.)

I get a lot of use out of Aegises, for the AoE defense, but I mostly run 'em on Invulns.

I finish my bids with ,908 and

... I still occasionally buy for ten times too much.

But not often.

To the OP:
Try joining global channels- RF2009 has a lot of experienced players who are frequently setting things up. (It replaced Radio Freedom; the channel was full of players who no longer played, so they couldn't be kicked out of the channel, and new players couldn't get in.) I'm sure there are other good channels on Freedom.

Generally the people who do what you're doing (spamming LFT, or PUG LFM or whatever) are also new to the game and have come from a game where that's how you form teams. Those are also the games where you form teams with a tank and a healer, or the teams don't work.

To the OP: People may be giving you more information than, strictly, you need when you're new to the game. I don't know how number-crunchy you are, but as a Scrapper all you really NEED is "Quick Recovery is fine, now jump in there and stab people." I would go so far as to say "You should also get a bunch of powers from Willpower" but, really, jump in there and stab people. If you want more details on how stuff works... we're still here and I for one love to hear myself talk.

Wow, I haven't seen one of those since... 2005? Maybe?

A lot of the old TFs aren't that spectacular, and as I mentioned, people have been taking the "spectacular" out of TFs as hard as they can. People want to skip most of Eden, and I'm like "WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLY BE DOING THAT'S MORE FUN THAN THIS?"

* Most Task Forces end with an Archvillain, which [in the low level game] is somewhat unusual. I know we're jaded these days.
* You can't add people to a TF in the middle. Once you start that's the team you're bringing to the end, minus anyone who has to leave for any reason. You could in theory run one over more than one session, but that never worked out so nobody ever did it. My first Manticore TF took eight hours. We started with one controller, who got kicked out after the first mission (due to some old issues with exemplaring) and no defenders. Five hours in, we lost power to the front of the house and the three of us who were all playing in the same room had to run extension cords from the kitchen. Six and a half hours in, Infinity went down for 20 minutes. BUT DAMN IT WE FINISHED IT. That was a bonding experience, right there. I know, these days if you run a TF in over two hours people get whiny, and everyone's done them ten times each and skips everything and takes shortcuts.
* Some Task Forces have unusual maps, unusual challenges and things that are just plain fun. If you haven't done Synapse, tell people to not leak the spoiler. If you haven't run the Hess TF (in Striga), you should. You just should. Also, Eden.

It is possible to build an AE mission that completes in less than 30 seconds- probably under 10. For some reason they thought completion bonuses were a bad idea.

Another thing that's probably new to you: patrol XP. While you're logged off your characters are burning debt and accumulating patrol XP- up to a level worth- that gets added onto regular XP. (I think World of Competition has a similar thing- "Being Rested" maybe?) You get a 50% bonus to XP from your patrol XP, which you also do not get in AE missions.

On the other hand, people made myriads* of farms and exploit missions in the AE, and some of those loopholes have not been closed [last I saw] so if you really want to farm your way to Hero of the City you can do it.

AE missions are extremely variable in difficulty, in reward and in storytelling skill. You can avoid some of those because they have descriptions like "Beat up the druk bimbo lol" but it's very easy for someone to make up a mission and not realize that players will have eight to ten Web Grenades on them at all times, to give a personal peeve. Or that their Elite Boss based on their favorite character is a 1-shotting maniac.

There is a whole forum full of people reviewing story arcs, so you CAN find stuff that's not horrible- some of it is better than most of the Dev-built content- but it's not casual to find, and it may be significantly harder than what you're used to.

* in the technical sense; 1 myriad = 10,000

If he was an actual martyr at least we'd have some fat, happy lions around here.

I hate all salad dressing.