Fulmens

There may be ONE Malta radio mission.

KoA and Malta are secret conspirators. I think the idea is they don't just wander around kidnapping people and getting seen by the police doing it.

Pulled the karma, Noght, for personal use. We are now collated with Original God's, Organica's one-person SG with a pillar and a ton of teleporters. Getting close to "dump a ton of merits" level!

To the OP: Very dead horse.

Biospark: you said

L26 Impervium Armor: +Resistance just listed at a shade over 2 million (recipe).

And we raised over $10,000 RWD! Thanks everyone who helped out!

And the drive is over. We raised over $10,000 !

Thanks to everyone who gave, and thanks to everyone who spread the word!

Things I'd avoid for a NEW player, and why:

Blasters. They tend to go from reallyreallyeasy to reallyreallyhard around level 30 and it's like hitting a wall.

Storm defenders. It's an odd set of skills. I've played with good Stormies and bad Stormies and I DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING DIFFERENTLY. In one case the team works, in the other it does not.

Force Field defenders. If you build right and do your job right, it's really kinda boring. The team never loses, but you don't DO much.

I was going to throw in ONE of those with a note saying "more info than you probably wanted". . .

I see IOs as [roughly] a three tier system. This system exists only in my mind; there's no official support or anything for it.

Tier one is generic IO's- use like SO's, remember there's a softcap at 95% for most things and 60% for a few - the equivalent of 3 SO's, generally.

Tier 2 is frankenslotting (miniguide in my sig, somewhere around post 20). This means using set IO's only for the fact that they work slightly better than regular IO's of the same level- two "triples" equal three singles, for instance. If you saw Hamidon-Os in the original game, these work like them, but worse. Frankenslotting is a little more expensive than SO's- maybe twice the cost, depending on how much time you want to spend shopping- but gives much better performance.

Tier 3 is set bonuses and VERY expensive builds. It is worth noting that there are certain specific, usually unique IO's that are nearly as good as an entire pool power. The famous "big ticket" items are these:

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Miracle:_Recovery
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Numina%2...ation/Recovery
(together, those give you the equivalent of unslotted stamina if I recall)
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Luck_of_...Recharge_Speed
(This can stack up to five times, giving you the equivalent of one SO of Recharge Reduction in every power. )

Note that being FAMOUS doesn't necessarily equate to being NEEDED BY YOU. I've slotted maybe half a dozen, all told, of those. On twenty or thirty IO'd out characters.

Tier 3 is big enough you could probably split it into several tiers, one for "regular very expensive things" and one for purple IO's and PVP IO's and ... whatever else people slot when they are making only one character, and making them as perfect as they can imagine, and time and inf are no object.

I'm cheap. But I love making inf on the markets. I have a lot of surplus money as a result.

Edited to give a rough "bracket" for costs:

A character that hit level 50 with SO's and retired, back in the old days had 10-25 million inf more than they could spend. That would be a lot more today, because you can sell your salvage and whatnot.

Level 22, your first character-full of SO's, cost 1 million inf. Your last character-full of SO's, around level 50, cost 5 million inf.

A character-full of level 35 generic IO's probably costs around 10 million inf (depending on how carefully you shop) but never needs to be replaced. Level 35 generics are very slightly better than +3 green SO's.

A character-full of "frankenslotted" IO's costs probably 10 to 20 million inf and gives you "about two extra slots" in each power.

A character-full of Tier 3 IO's can cost 200 million inf to ... I don't even know. Ten billion inf? More? The sky is really the limit.

(The good news is, you don't need Tier 3, and you can make a lot of money on the market with a little patience and education.)

I'm going to do this with level 35's because I try to avoid "the assumption of level 50".

My limited experience with this sort of power is that people want either a heal with some bonus damage, or damage with some bonus healing. I'm going to aim for both...and a little bit (20-40%) of End Reduction.

I'm also going to run this up with 40-45% Acc- a bit low for some people, but I usually have some global Acc bonuses and I don't have most people's psychotic miss-phobia.

So my goals:
40%-ish Acc
20-40% End Red
60%+ recharge
90%+ heal OR 90%+ damage
60%-ish "the other one"
... or better.

Acc/Dam/Rech, Acc/Dam,Dam/Rech (Thunderstrike or Ruin depending on budget) =42% Acc, 42% Rech, 64% Dam
Heal/Rech, Heal/End/Rech = 42% Rech, 42% Heal, 18% End
Heal = 38% Heal

TOTAL: 42% acc, 20% endred, 84% rech, 64% dam, 80% heal. Maybe go Dam/End/Rech instead of Dam/Rech.

If you are level 50 and money is no object you can throw in an Acc/Dam nucleolus, an End/Heal golgi, one Dam/Rech, one Damage and two Heal/Rech at level 50 to get 33% acc, 33% end reduction, 95% dam, 77% rech, and 86% Heal. Or two dam/rech, one heal/rech and one heal for 95% heal/86% damage.

By the way, don't worry about having multiple characters, or having characters on multiple servers. I'm told that in most MMO's you pretty much don't want to go through the early game again... I've got a couple dozen characters at a wide variety of levels and I like playing them ALL.

A couple points on "game population":

1) There are more people on Virtue and Freedom than all the other servers combined. There may be more people on EACH of virtue and freedom than all the other servers combined, I'm not sure.

2) There are 2 or 3 times as many people blueside as redside, normally.

3) One quirk of the search command ( /search or /sea ,as mentioned): it initially shows you the people in your zone, only. If you hit enter it will show you all the people in the game on your side.

I don't have much firepower on Champion, but if you're on infinity, pinnacle [another famously low-pop server], victory or freedom I can hop on and beat stuff up with you.

What hours do you normally play?

At the least, Master of Magic had it. . .

* Fitness pool. You don't need Stamina AT level 20 [earliest you can get it and you need two powers from Fitness first] but you probably want it by level 24 or so.

*If you have a toggle power that says things like "Protects from Sleep, Hold, Knockback and Disorient" you very likely want that toggle as soon as possible. You don't need to run it ALL the time [until you get to about level 30, anyway] but when you need it, you probably need it a lot.

* The best team/fastest way to 50/most stompy character is the one that you enjoy most.

Hyperstrike: My feeling is "if there are 10 for sale and the last 5 sales took three months, there's plenty of supply." I don't want to be The Lawgiver or anything here, but if you want suggestions I can make suggestions.

I'm guilty of not doing anything Redside. It's true.

Question: What sort of rules should we have on the SG bins? I'm pretty new to this. My first draft of The Rules is "Generics are free for all, but if you want a set IO, send a global tell to the person who put it in and ask." The Suggestion: we're a fairly loose-knit bunch, so if you get a Blessing of the Zeph -KB, you probably shouldn't tempt your SGmates by leaving it around no matter what The Rules say.

One of my big marketeers [a couple billion generated at various points] is under level 20.

To farm for big numbers you pretty much have to be farming at level 50.

To market for big numbers you just need a little patience. .. and you need to grow your wealth.

I think of the stages as "one million, five million, fifty million, hundreds" but I don't market much above a couple hundred million on any given character, because I'm cheap and stuff.

To get to a million, you can sell unloved set recipes, or SO's that people have thrown up on the market. You can do this in about an hour if you've got a vendor near Wents.

To get to five million you can buy Tier 3 inspirations, combine them into something more attractive (three damage into one defense, for instance) and make 100K or more relisting them. Or you can buy common salvage that's in low supply for 10K (in stacks of 10) and sell it for 51K or 101K or however much you think you can get. You can buy generic crafted IO's for 5 or 10K and sell them for 180K. This is something you can do in a couple nights.

From five million to fifty million you can memorize a recipe or two, or you can carefully buy a couple of cheap level 50 recipes and their salvage, craft them and sell them. Once those sell, buy a couple more and continue in that way. (There are mistakes you can make at this point which will cost you money. Read guides.) I'm talking about "a million for the recipe, half a million crafting cost, trivial for salvage, sell for five to ten million."

Fifty million you can start looking at better deals- things that cost five million for the recipe, a million and a half for the salvage, and sell for fifteen or twenty million.

A couple hundred million is usually where I stop playing the market (If one of my characters needs more inf than that, usually I'll just transfer it) but when I did play in this sandbox, briefly, I did things like buy purples for 160 million and sell for 240 million.

Fine.

FINE!!!!

I HATE YOU ALL!

/em slams door to room

I ended up with a whole page of overcomplicated math, but yes. It's the resist debuff.

Resistance debuffs add to the damage that BOTH of you do, with every attack. If you can stack up 60% Resistance Debuff on one target, then BOTH of you are doing 60% more damage with every attack on that target. More math available if desired.

(Ice doesn't really have that much more AOE- the recharge is very long on Ice Storm. )

The "two emp/sonic" combo that gets mentioned a lot is due to a quirk of the powerset. Empathy has all the buff powers to make the person next to you a spectacular, unstoppable monster, but almost none of those tools work on you, yourself. Two empathy defenders is like being able to use those buff powers on yourself. You both end up with the regen rate of a Regeneration scrapper at their peak [more,actually], the defenses of a Super Reflexes scrapper... you're pretty much unkillable. There are also dramatic offensive and utility buffs.

/Sonic is chosen so you can both stack up resistance debuffs and easily get to double damage or more.

The end result should be pretty much like when the original tanks hit the trenches in WWI, with a side order of cheesy Christian parable.

... and the potential to yell at your significant other when they forget to renew your buffs.

En/Fire is, as far as I could work out, a primary and secondary that don't do each other ANY favors.

My three favorite blasters are Fire/Elec, Fire/Energy, and Fire/Ice .

I've also played to high levels and enjoyed Sonic/Mental and Ice/Ice. En/Fire is a special case: my second character ever started, and about my seventh level 50. Went through at least six respecs and I never really enjoyed her.

If I was going to do another Fire/* blaster it would be Fire/Mental.

Not the opinion you asked for, but "farming", to me, means "Getting good at the game and turning the difficulty DOWN." What is it that you expect to get out of the top-end game?

Warning: if one character puts two 2billion inf bids on the SAME item, the system will combine them. And then you can't undo the bid without losing a lot of inf. (If you bid, for instance, 1 billion on each of ten things, storing 10 billion, and you undo the bid, you're put at the max inf cap of 2 billion and the other 8 billion disappears into the system. )

... throwing more scrappers at the Envoy of Shadows, or at Nosferatu, is not a known recipe for success. Just sayin'.