Fulmens

If I was going to try this challenge, and I found some way I could temporarily beat the time, I'd ouro that thing to death.

EDIT:
Just ran a sample mission or two on a L36 blaster.
First (PWNZ badge, heroic) I got 43K XP of which 8800 was mission completion bonus. That was in patrol mode, so "raw" numbers are 2/3 of those.
Second (radio mission, heroic, defeat boss only) I got 18K of which 6400 was mission completion bonus. Still patrol mode. From the time I clicked "enter mission" to the time I clicked "Exit" was 2 min 19 seconds. 854K for level, so we have on the order of 1% of level XP per mission complete bonus, at 2 minutes per mission, at level 36. So again it looks like we're not going to get more than a couple percent of speedup for mission completions.

So I can't see any reason why we'd want to do this anywhere but AE.

Let's look at some numbers- I know, I'm answering someone I put on /ignore, but hopefully something constructive will result.

With no slotting:
The defensive toggles are .21, .21, .21, .26 .That seems reasonable.
Death Shroud is .52 end per second and Quills is .52 end per second.
Dark Consumption is 34 end every time you use it.

Your defensive toggles are not the problem- the end reduction I have in Death Shroud would pay the full cost of Cloak of Darkness.

The heal and the offensive toggles are your endurance destroyers. And that it's hard to argue that the heal is overpriced when it takes 1/3 of your end bar and returns 3/3 of your health bar.

At some point I calculated [and I think this is wrong, looking back] that having a Damage Aura on was like having an AOE attack on auto that went off every ten seconds... and didn't interfere with your attack chain. So having Quills, Death Shroud and Spine Burst was like trying to pay the cost of three AOEs, plus run a singletarget attack chain. Looking at it now, looks like you get the damage of an AOE in ten seconds, at 1/2 or 1/3 of the price of an AOE. Still, the moral is clear: if you wouldn't be using Spine Burst in the next 10 seconds or so, you shouldn't have your damage auras turned on.

So Spine/Dark has every kind of big endurance hog there is- two damage auras, one giant heal, four passive toggles and a couple of AOE's. Other than "play Claws/Dark" what can be done about this?

1) If you get a damage aura, slot it heavily or don't run it at all. If you must run generic IOs or SO's, one acc/three damage/two end (or two dam/three end) gives optimum DPE.
Obviously with cheap frankenslotting you can get 1.5 acc/three damage/three end or the equivalent pretty easily.

2) Your first three slots in Dark Regeneration go to endurance recovery. If you have six people around you when you fire it, you will almost certainly get three hits even with NO accuracy. More than three hits is wasted because one hit = 1/3 of your HP. 17 endurance is bad, but 34 endurance is unlivable.

3) If you team, use your team- make sure you get any end boosts or heals going around. If you have END problems limit your AOE attacks to when they are most useful.

4) If you solo, big bunches of minions are your friend. At one point when I was soloing in the teens I was going to Perez, just sitting in the middle of blue-con groups and when they were about 40% health, firing off Spine Burst. They all dropped before they thought to run. Two blues is the same XP as one yellow.

5) Speaking of attacking... if you're just sitting in a group, running Quills and Death Shroud, you are doing as much DPS as hitting each of them with Storm Kick every eight seconds. If you have endurance problems, you can attack by just standing there catching your breath and it works pretty well.

Somewhere in my miniguide thread [see signature] there's a general "Blaster Guide".

They've got kind of a weird curve where they go from "really easy" in the first 20 levels to "not nearly as easy" somewhere around level 30.

I ran Dark/Traps to 50 as a corruptor, mostly solo, with the idea of near-cap Defense, Acc Debuff from the two cones, and Life Drain as a backup in case I did get hit. It was kinda low on damage but worked well. Lots of "oh sh**" buttons.

At the time everyone was going "poison gas trap with procs" (bugged to give about 8 times too many procs going off) and not looking at anything else in Traps, so I don't know what the actual smart way to play is. Mine probably wasn't it.

Recommendations from a very quick skim:

It looks like you're in love with set bonuses and you are gimping the performance of actual powers with your slotting. This is a very common mistake people make in Mid's.

Examples:
1) Short on recharge in your two main cones. Five posis gives you something like 25% Recharge. Yes, and 6.25% global. The two cones were my bread and butter. Sixth slot Recharge, and you get an extra 40% recharge or thereabouts.
2) Put more slots into Maneuvers. For pity's sake it's not even defense-capped.
3) Same with Force Field generator. You're spending hundreds of millions 3-slotting Zephs for less benefit than you'd get from spending 50 K and one slot on a generic IO in FFG.

I got the "arc complete" bonus for Piercing the Veil and... didn't write it down. It was approximately 16K for a level 30 character, doing 1 hunt, 2 talk-tos, 2 "regular" door missions and 3 kill-alls. Mission complete was approximately 2.2K just before that, so the arc bonus looks very roughly like "the same as all the mission bonuses" in this case alone.

The FASTEST I've ever heard of people doing an ouro mission [back when there was that level 9 or 14 timed in KR which gave juicy merits] was around 3 minutes. I've done them in under 5 (the loa bone) myself.

If all the missions were 4.5 minutes [I know, they're not, due to kill-all] and intermissions were 30 seconds that's, plus or minus fenceposts, 40 minutes. Mission and arc bonuses are something like 32,000 XP out of a 256,000 XP level. So in this case, which is memorably large, you get 1/8 of a level in arc bonuses in the time that, by your DPE calculation, you'd be getting about an entire level.

If you could somehow get 4000 XP per mission in mission/arc bonus at level 30, with a 3 minute mission, you'd be getting XP at almost 1/3 of a level per hour not counting any defeats along the way. That's roughly 6 times slower than your optimum rate. For me that's just on the "ignore" side of the line, but it's close.

I need to get better Loa bone measurements before I come back to this thread.

Macskull: I was thinking of lining up a reasonable supply of targets (say 5 or 10 on a side) such that you were only limited by your ability to inflict damage, not by number of targets. Calling this PVP is, obviously, a polite fiction.

It's not so much "Back in the day, you could get two bubbles of debt in the 40's!"

It was that back in the day, two bubbles of XP in the 40's took you four hours, or if you were going like the hammers of hell, maybe two.

So it took you eight hours of play, with no further deaths, to erase that debt.

I had friends I convinced to try the Sewer Trial and they didn't want to touch it again for three and a half years.

OK, I'm scared. I remember that Chuck Norris movie from EnigmaBlack's avatar. Maybe not from the theater, but not too long afterwards... damn, I'm old.

Allegedly, the thing is going for 4 billion or more, from the rumors bouncing around the Market forum.

You can lock away 2 billion at a time by making fake bids at Wents, in case you didn't know, for things like level 51 recipes. So it's gotta be a series of transactions with pauses in between while you go to the market and store /get your money. . .

I've never dealt in quantities quite that big. Enjoy!

... that was also on a kat/regen, which starts with some excellent tools like some built-in ToHit, -Defense on enemies, a heal, improved Stamina, and potentially capped melee/lethal defense.

I'm not saying it's Rad/Sonic levels of "doesn't really need enhancements" but it's one of the better ones to try that with, I think.

Free transfers are running out soon, aren't they?

Adding for sale:
Recipe- pounding slugfest, chance to disorient, just over 5M
Crafted- Expedient Thingy, resistance for pets, level 30 and 37, just under 10 million each
Crafted-Sting of Manticore, L37, acc/int/range, just under 5 million

1. broadcast and explain to the smartelbows in Atlas Park Freedom what you're doing.
2. Explain in /tell to someone who actually DOES have more than 20 merits at a level under 41 what you're doing.
3. Meet them at a merit vendor, give them the inf.
[Person in question rolls random]
4. Trade again, getting the recipes.

I've never been ripped off, which is pleasant and slightly surprising to me. People have taken the inf and happily handed over Miracle +Regens, LoTGs, and other items of disproportionate value. Of course, I've also given the inf and seen someone roll a jaw-dropping collection of terrible things. To be fair, that was before they weighted the tables, but still... sixteen things in a row.

If I remember, there's a bug with various "cap at 20" recipes where they aren't dropping from 16 or 17 to 20. It may have been fixed when I wasn't looking, though.

See, it's that "90 hours" thing that people don't want to put in, I think.

My problem with channels is that I'm already in ten of them. I need to grit my teeth and kill one.

I bought a bunch of random rolls at 15 million each. Not everything is listed because of lack of slots. Prices are "just under" for rapid sale.

Devastation Dam/Rech at 30x2 - one sold (uncrafted for 1M), one crafted for sale at 5M
Gaussian Rech/End (two at 37; sold one, crafted, for 20 million inf. The other is a recipe, for sale just under 15M. )
Impervium Armor: Resist (29 and 37; listed for 19 and 25M)
Luck of the Gambler: Def/End/Rech L37; listed for 8 M)
Obliteration Acc/Dam/End/Rech (L37, crafted, listed for 25M)
Scirocco's Chance for Lethal (L29, listed for 11 M)

... so looks like 110 M with a few more coming, on an investment of 240 M. So it goes.

I'm not a good enough player to do this in practice, so I'm just going to talk theory.

1) Are you assuming that you're always running through Patrol Experience? I didn't see it mentioned either way, but that's a potential 50% bonus if you're not in AE. AE is most likely to give the easy-kill enemies we covet, though.

2) There are arc completions that award large amounts of XP. Of course, those arcs are not conveyor belts of +2 bosses, but I remember getting close to a bubble of XP for finishing one of the Croatoa arcs. I don't think it's likely to be exploitable (I think it's either Skipper or Buck, so best case it's six missions and two are Defeat All) but with Ouro, it's one loophole I'd look at. (They closed the "Welcome to Vanguard" version of this but there may be more subtle ones.)

3) I think that AOE's are potentially huge, but I don't know the +2 boss to +1 minion XP ratio. Given a conveyor belt of pacifist minions, and perfect placement, a Fire/Mental blaster could beat ten +1 minions per cycle of AOE's (maybe +2, but I don't think so), and given 100% recharge in Fire Breath could do so every 10.67 seconds. (Given infinite recharge and a pretty fast conveyor, they could do so every 5.5 seconds or so.) Drain Psyche virtually eliminates endurance as a consideration, so we're damage-limited.

4) I don't know if CaB's can be discounted. You can start with a full tray of CaBs. (How do those compare to carrying damage enhancements?) You can combine to create CaBs. If you're beating bosses you will not generate as many inspirations but they will tend to be larger; I don't have useful numbers on that. If you remember the old Nethergoat Dark Astoria runs, if you beat enough minions fast enough you can keep yourself in perma-inspiration. I don't know if they tweaked the inspiration drop rates after that was discovered.
5) I'd be interested in the "damage chain" measurement- assuming enough damage to exactly match an AV's regen rate, how does that convert to +2 Bosses Per Second and how long would it take to hit level 50 at that damage rate? (I picked that as a level of damage that some sub-50 characters can reach, but few can significantly exceed. If you have a better standard, feel free. )

V-side I'm Self Forging Weapon.
H-side I'm E K Nachtmusic and Protection Racket . May also show up on someone else in a coalesced SG from time to time, possibly.

Someone check my math on this.

48 PVP recipes. If I can kill someone in 60 seconds, which I don't know about, that's 100 minutes per recipe.

If we say three recipes are in the billion range (the Panacea unique, the Gladiator's Armor unique, and one other that I don't know?) then you have to get, on average, 16 PVP recipes to get one of them.

1600/60= just under 27 hours of PVP'ing to get a 1-5 billion inf bonanza.

Sounds like a good rate of return- if it's something you'd enjoy doing anyway.

Ok, Tidbit and someone else have enough privs to set up a base v-side. Also panzer.

I'd say that the most important things on my Blasters aside from their main attacks (up to 9 in some cases) are:
1. Build Up and Aim. [I don't play AR or Dev. I said MY blasters for a reason.]
2. Stamina.
3. Some sort of knockback protection (I tend to go with, for instance, Hover and a Karma -knockback IO.)
4. Distant 4th, some sort of stealth (again, I tend to go with an IO in a movement power.)

I have a miniguide to playing Blasters in my sig- scroll down, because internal links in the guide are broken.