Fulmens

And that's how random number generation works in the real world too. Humans are pattern matching creatures and if you feed us random noise we find patterns anyway. Faces in clouds is the classic example, but if you watch people playing roulette, you'll see the same thing.

I think it produces general "ease of use", removes near-identical items ("Oh, a level 32 is zero point two percent worse than a level 33- that's a heck of a difference") and generally avoids having a lot of unnecessary crap lying around. Same reason they got rid of level 53 TO's, basically.

Given that the horse has left the barn, Advanced Bidding does put a band-aid over the... umm, mixed metaphor.

Enots: Welcome to the wonderful, consequence-free world of anonymous feedback.

On topic, any system with a source of something but no sink will eventually fill up with crap. Before we had anything to spend inf on except SO's, influence was worthless to anyone over about level 36. It was a pointless measurement.

99.9% would mean only about 130 people who get to wear the Inf cap. From doing my currency exchange, and helping turn inf into prestige, I have the names of at least 20. From seeing the various threads on the Market forums, I could probably find another 40.

Seems unlikely that I'd know half of the bi-billionaires in the game. Hell, when the market started it turned out that two people I knew were billionaires (they'd built it up to turn into Prestige, then decided the rate sucked.)

Unfortunately, it is true that some of the Dev's Choices give less than full XP these days. I don't remember which one I tried- I think it was chosen before the XP nerf went in- but we were getting much less than standard XP. 25% sounds plausible.

When the system was very new, a few people had similar ideas. (I think I wanted "every three levels" for reasons that probably boiled down to novelty.)

I tend to 5- or 6-slot Red Fortune in my bubbles, depending on availability of slots. You don't NEED more than 3 slots to do their job, but as you've noted, Force Fielders tend to have a few spare slots in the later levels.

Life Drain is an excellent idea, as mentioned- it provides free healing for the one who needs it on the team. You can make it a "heal that does damage" or "An attack that heals" - I'm not sure you can fully slot both until level 50 and purples/hamidon enhancements become available. (And oh my are those expensive...)

It does seem that there's been a factor of 5-6 in price increase at the low end. This is because when someone from the high end dips in, they're like "10K? Here's 100K, kid, buy yourself a soda."

Unlockable might be MORE work than otherwise- it's entirely new [far as I know] fundamental code.

Most of these ideas look, to me, like you'd get EVERYTHING in the market looking like, say, level 50 Multistrikes: 85 for sale, 0 bidding, last 5 for 5000 inf. Which returns the game to "inf means nothing and there's nothing to buy."

Which makes it just like the days before IO's but way higher-powered.

Which makes it a lot like Issue 4. No thanks.

Westley (formerly Philotic Knight) and I have a long history of hassling each other about various things FF-related, but when it comes down to the basics we tend to give most of the same advice to new FF'ers.

/em looks at timer on desk

That's a miscommunication.

In an AE mission that drops tickets you have no chance of getting a purple. Dev's Choice gives you the "regular drops plz" option, which gives you normal chances of getting a purple. Which is better than none, I think.

As for "normal missions" vs. dev's choice vs. other things: It's about one drop per 1500 enemies per person on team, by TopDoc's math. Normal radio missions don't give you as many enemies as carefully chosen missions where you're trying to swamp yourself in baddies (looping through the Council Earth mission over and over, set to +0/x8, for instance).

If you're running the Imperious Task Force, your team is required to beat something like 400 badguys just to complete the thing, and when I've done it we usually hit around a thousand, I think. So that's a very good chance of a purple for SOMEONE on the team, and you're getting other stuff on the way.

While we're self-promoting: "Big Ideas", by @Amazing Amazon, is good for the mid-20's villain blues.

The question nobody's asked so far is "What kind of builds, on what kind of budgets?" You can tear through content pretty well on a 100-million-inf build, and you can make a hundred million in a week on the market.*

A lot of people only look at very high end builds, because it's just as easy in Mid's to pick a Hecatomb as a Crushing Impact. And if you want a very high end build, I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. But ask yourself what you're doing and why, before you do it.

* People who put the time and effort in have made 2 BILLION in a week on the market. I'm not that good and I don't work that hard.

Edited: The question nobody had asked, when I started typing. Damn you, Sailboat!

A good Force Fielder is never a waste. I have like five of them. I don't like FF/Rad as a combo and I have one of those at 50.

If you were level 3 I'd suggest restarting, but for level 34... only if you want to.

What you can do with Dark Blast:
* protect your tender self by debuffing accuracy.
* when solo, immob people with the Tentacles, back up and hit them with Nightfall for double debuff, double cone damage. Eventually they will die and you will win.
* use some very solid singletarget attacks on teams.

Where you might run into trouble with Dark Blast:
* The two cones are disproportionately good at getting and keeping aggro. (There are mechanical reasons; AOE, DOT, with a mez effect in the Tentacles. ) Everyone else on the team is tougher than you are, by the design of the set. Force Fields is the only set I've ever played where "Aggro control" is a real meaningful concept.
* If you start missing people with the two cones, they will hit you, like, twice as often as if you'd hit them. So you might have sudden moments of extra drama while soloing.

Depends on whether you use Hibernation or not, I guess.

A regular IO in Stamina will give you 10% more End Recovery per minute (40% of 25% ) which is very close to 10 recovery per minute, depending on what your total endurance is ; the Performance Shifter will give you 10 endurance, on average every 50 seconds or 12.5 End Recovery per minute. The Shifter has a small chance of bringing back your endurance quickly after a nuke or in some other -recovery situation (the only ones I know of are in AE, but that might say more about me than about the game.) The Miracle is 15% End Recovery per minute, and the Numina is 10%.

With Stamina 2-slotted conventionally, the Numina, and no Miracle, you'd have end recovery of, hmm... (Assuming 110 endurance)

110 per minute normally
50 per minute from Stamina
16 per minute from Numina
9 from Thunderstrike
5 from Positron

... at least 190 end per minute.

Charged Bolts, for reference, takes 3.25 end to fire, in a tiny bit more than one second, and has a 30% chance of returning 2.6 endurance. A single-target-blast attack chain of Charged Bolt and Lightning Bolt (very similar ratio) would use up 148 endurance per minute. I know, every other attack you have uses more endurance per second, but ... really, how much do you need? Are you planning on soloing AV's with this character?

They might be able to make "inf stored" an unsigned int and double the cap to 4 billion (or so). This reduces the scale of potential errors from "wrecking the data structure and dooming us all" to "maybe giving a lot of people 2^31 extra inf or having their net worth roll over and become negative."

Downsides:
1) Standard Code Rant
2) 4 billion is pre-exceeded by hundreds if not thousands of characters
3) Might only be easily applicable to character wealth and not to, say, item prices

... the more I think about it, the more it's not a real solution

Back when I picked my first Force Field combo, I chose FF/Elec because that way I had a choice about when and how to knock enemies back. Looking back, I'm pretty happy with that decision, but I'm not much of a KB fiend for someone with four (at least) FF defenders.

If you're just going to choose "Knockback all the time" anyway, I guess there's no downside to FF/Energy.

Thunderous Blast drains endurance per enemy hit. If you hit one enemy you have some END left, and hitting three you have no END left. I don't know if two enemies leaves you anything.

Given the unlikelihood of having any END left after using it, I don't really see a downside to slotting for End Mod.

You have successfully balanced a large number of constraints. Looks good. Minor possibilities and suggestions remain.

1) I'd be surprised (since most of your powers have 20-60% endurance reduction in them, and most elec powers have a chance of give-back) if you needed a Miracle, a Numina in health AND a Perf Shifter in Stamina.
2) I noticed that because I was trying to scavenge slots to put extra Recharge in Thunderous Blast and Ball Lightning.
2.1) The Kismet in Hover is another choice for "Where to scavenge slots." I'm less miss-sensitive than other people, I know, but I'd be surprised if 6% To Hit made a difference considering your high global acc bonus (40% at least) and the 60% acc in most of your attacks.
3) You probably know this, but you can get the Thunderstrike sets at just about any level with nearly the same performance as "all 50's". Same with Positrons.
4) Aid Self may or may not work better with a Heal and Heal/Rech than with two Heal/Rech- you'd have to try it to know which way works better. More "heal NOW" and less total healing.

... Postie threw me off there.

The extra 150% Regen would be equal to 1 small green insp every 40 seconds. Capped Defense is harder to simulate because it's only SOME attacks that are almost entirely stopped. Capped Defense to all is like four purples all the time.