Fulmens

The market really is the way to go.

It's VERY common to find IO's where the recipe sells for X (say, 5 million) and the crafted IO sells for X + 10 million. Now you have to take out the cost of the salvage and the crafting cost (probably 1.5 million) and you lose 10% in Went fees, but you can still make over 5 million per craft-and-sell.

You have to plan ahead on this- it is very rare to find such a recipe in stock, so you put up bids and wait for a few hours- but I have made literal billions this way. A lot of it, admittedly, at more than 10 million profit per item, but you can get rich without setting foot out of Wentworth's.

Read a guide or two for details on what NOT to do- there are mistakes to make, and you will probably make each of them at least once. I sure did.

I know that Short Circuit always got enemies to scatter when they got to 0 end, but I never really noticed if it was "0 end" or "not recovering end".

Sorry to be less than useful.

... of course, XP caps when enemies get to be about +4 to you. But who's counting?

TL;DR version- To Hit is complex but there are good reasons.

I think of it as "Final To Hit = Acc Term * ToHit Term".
In the original version of the game, Defense came off the Final To Hit. SR had about 70% Defense, I think. So you'd drop every even-con enemy to the 5% base. But if you were fighting +2s, minions had 5% to hit, Lieuts had 10% and Bosses had 25% chance to hit. So the enemies went from "never killing you" to "killing you all the time" with almost nothing in the middle.

Currently, Defense comes off the To Hit term. To Hit is almost always 50% for critters. So if you have 40% Defense you will turn 80% of "what would have been hits" into misses, no matter what the "what would have been hit" percentage is.

That's probably incomprehensible. Let me try again.

... I just did this in another thread. Hope that helps.

OP said:
[quote]I was always told that SR was hard to play, heavy cost to endurance, and only really good for PvP. I have found that to be untrue personally, he survives as well or better than my Regen/Dark Scrappers I made and seems average to light on Endurance, did something change? [...] FYI the build is Dark/SR and I mostly solo at a 3/+1/[quote]

The way Defense [and Acc Debuff] works in this game is that 45% Defense protects you twice as well as 40% Defense, which protects you twice as well as 30% Defense which protects you twice as well as, umm, 10% defense.

Yes, 45% is eight times better than 10%.

Also, 90% protects you just as well as 45%, almost all the time.

(You subtract it from the enemy To Hit, which is almost always 50%, and multiply that by a number based on their level and rank. So a +2 boss always hits 1.56 times as often as an even-con minion.)

Dark Melee has -ToHit in every attack. So it works very well with SR to get enemies down to the "ToHit floor".

Congratulations on finding an excellent pairing!

Zombie Man:

I remember a lot of people running around in issues 1-2 with their "We're the SIXTH column! We're cool because we're like them but, you know, not really" BS. With names like Obergruppenfuhrer Bob or whatever.

I usually opened with the Girlfriend/Thanksgiving story. I had it down to a couple of sentences- I'm out of practice now- but basically, one of my ex-girlfriends didn't really celebrate Thanksgiving. It's a time to get together with extended family... and her parents were each the only survivor in their families of the holocaust.

Yeah, I'm quite sure [they were] not like THOSE nazis, but you see how people could get the impression that [they] were Aryan Nations holocaust-denying stupid scumbags... I wouldn't feel right putting on anything associated with those guys, but go ahead. Free country. As long as the 5th column doesn't win, that is.

Oh, man... I'm almost sorry I brought up Defense/ToHit. Skip to the yellow stars if you don't want to deal with Wall of Text.

The Paragon Wiki article is good. However, sometimes it helps if someone else says the same thing differently; either that or I love to hear myself talk.

I'm going to give a slight oversimplification- note these are my own terms and not standardized vocabulary:

Final To Hit = (Acc term) x (To Hit term).
To Hit term can't be less than 5%.
Final To Hit can't be less than 5% either.

Acc term is where things go like "slotting accuracy in your powers". For critters, it's where things go like "being higher level" and "being a boss".

"To Hit term" is where things go like Defense, and taking yellow insps, and ToHit Debuff.

EXAMPLE 1: An even-con minion attacking an undefended character has Acc Term of 1.0 and ToHit term of 50%, so Final ToHit of 50%.

EXAMPLE 2: a +2 boss attacking an undefended character has an Acc Term of (1.2 for level times 1.3 for being a boss) and a ToHit term of 50%. So 1.56 * 50% = 78% to hit.

EXAMPLE 3:
+2 boss, character with 40% Defense, that would be 1.56 * (50%-40%) or 15.6% chance to hit. Defense comes off the "ToHit" term.

EXAMPLE 4:
+2 boss, character with 90% Defense, that would be 1.56 * (5%) or 7.8% to hit. There's always a minimum of 5% in the ToHit term.

EXAMPLE 5:
+2 boss, character with 40% ToHit Debuff. You only do 80% damage against +2 enemies (the Purple Patch, which you probably remember) and you only do 80% debuff as well. So that 40% debuff becomes 32%. So the Acc Term is still 1.56 and the ToHit term is (50% -32%) or 18%. So that's, umm, about 25% Final To Hit.

**********************************

As far as the specifics of your build: I've never done Dark/Dark, and I'm not good with Hami-Os. Lemme look anyway.

FEARSOME STARE: This is a huge to hit debuff, if slotted, (around 30%) so you want acc, to hit debuff, and recharge. I think of the Fear as a bonus.

So if you slot one Lyso, two Membranes, and an Acc/Rech from Analyze Weakness you should be at about 90% recharge, capped -ToHit, and 55% or so Acc (Seems like plenty to me, but some people hate missing more than I do.)

For your cones, which someone mentioned, you need more recharge. Ideally I'd aim for 55% Acc, 95% Dam, 95% Rech, 40% EndRed and 56% debuffs- but that's about 11 SO's so I will have to compromise. Maybe.

One nucleolus, three membranes, that's 33% acc, 33% dam, 95% rech and 56% debuff. Add a Detonation Acc/dam/end (L44+), that's 53% acc, 53% dam, 95% rech, 56% debuff, 20% end.
Add a Detonation dam/end (L44+) and we're at 53% acc, 78% dam, 95% rech, 56% debuff, 45% end.

That's not quite right.

One Nucl, two membranes, one Siphon Insight Acc/End/Rech, 53% acc, 33% dam, 91% rech, 40% debuff, 20% end ... add a (L50) damage and a (L44-50) Detonation Dam/End and we're at:
53% Acc, 95% Dam, 91% Rech, 40% Debuff, 45% End. So that turns 7.5% debuff into 10.5% (vs a theoretical max of 12%.) I can live with that if you can.

Someone should really check that in Mid's. Detonations are cheap; Siphon Insights are probably cheap.

Hope this was a useful wall of text.

I tend to store either just under 500 million, or just under a billion, in a single bid.

Go ahead. Take it!

Gunslingers, at least it's their JOB to be accurate.

Your snipe's been getting outranged since level 21, by no-name minions, and you're complaining in the 40's?

A lot of this is "everyone has their Kryptonite"- I may kvetch about individual mobs on individual characters that show up in the 40's but I'm not REALLY complaining because, duh, it's the job of the guys in the endgame to be hard. It annoys me that you can even GET easy missions in the 40's these days, but I don't see a way around it.

I reserve my actual complaints about badguys for stuff you run into at level 15, or 25, or 30.

Like the PPD in the mid-game Mayhems. Glued down, slowed, poisoned- we are actually HAPPY when we get to the 35-40 mayhem and the PPD just has power armor and psychics, and maybe Kheldians. I've seriously suggested flying to the bank and just letting all the damn Longbow Eagles hammer on our heads at once to avoid the PPD.

I hate COT spectrals, with heavily lethal-resistant, acc-debuffing minions that show up in 12-packs. Being unable to hit anything, ever, gives me nerdrage.

Hmm. This may not pass the two-click rule but it's from one of my absolute favorite recent sites ever. Judging pulp books by the cover, yup yup yup.

Four years... wow.

Do you know about Enhancement Diversification? (more than "three SO's" of a single thing is wasted. 95% for most things, 56% for defense, damage resistance, acc debuff, range, and a few other things.) This happened just after the Global Defense Nerf ("You mean that I should have to use enhancements when fighting on the hardest difficulty with seven AFK teammates? This sucks!")

Also, they redid Defense and Acc Debuffing in a way that is, umm, complex to explain.

And many, many other changes.

Welcome back. You may want to do some homework.

Some people like playing only one character. Some people only like badging, or farming, or running TFs or base creation or building AE arcs or... whatever.

I'm not going to say this game is _about_ alts... but for me, that's one of the major things. Also, to be honest, the friends; if you aren't meeting new people to hang out with, and your old ones are leaving, it might suck. This game isn't really strong, solo.

You may not want anything but badges, and you may have no interest in running a badge character villainside (come on, you can walk around wearing Global Threat proudly), in which case... there's no reason to play a game you don't enjoy.

I hope you find something cool to do,and I hope you continue to hang out here. But mostly, have fun.

Fire/En blasters, also- but I think the Kheld has the advantage in energy efficiency.

Feel free to ask any other questions- even if it seems like a stupid question, chances are I've done it, or something stupider.

I've got 63 months in this game and zero purples slotted.

On the other hand, I've only soloed one AV. In some circumstances, for some goals, purples are the way to go. I don't play that way, but you could if you wanted.

Level 15,20 and 30 IO's are better than the equivalent-level boughten items.

The original system was off in a number of ways- you weren't expected in the design phase to have full SO's until about level 32, so level 25 SO's were relatively overpowered. (and they thought people would use global channels to trade and/or sell low level SO's to each other.And they didn't foresee the relatively vast fortunes every level 50 would have. Mistakes were made.)

Normally I try to keep myself to one answer per new guy, because I can't shut up. I'm going for two here: Enhancements and "the defender's job".

The "max of 3" guideline for enhancements is to avoid fairly simple math. It works fine as long as you're using single-origin enhancements or "generic IOs". The rule is pretty much "three SO's gets you to the softcap." Which is a little under the three-SO value, so 95% for most things and 56% for a few (range, dam resistance and defense.) If you want to do more complex stuff with IO's, ask and I'll probably not shut up for six paragraphs.

Small history note: we have two overlapping systems of enhancements, really. Training/dual origin/single origin was the only system for the first few years; then we added the Invention system, which can do everything the original system can do and a lot more. It is also much more complex. Don't worry about the invention system unless 1) you're comfortable enough with the rest of the game to learn new stuff and
2) You want to do more with your character for whatever reason (I MUST KICK TAIL or I WANT TO STOP DYING SO MUCH or WHY CAN HE DO THAT AND I CAN'T or I'M BORED or whatever.)

The defender's job: As I understand it, in WoW there's this sort of wack-a-mole game with other players' health bars. You're playing on reflexes and twitch speed. It allegedly looks something like this. Or this.

In this game, and you have to understand this, YOU do not kill THEM. THEY kill THEMSELVES. You have a variety of tools to make their lives easier, but defender guilt is for other games.

Buffs and debuffs are tremendously powerful in this game. I remember people talking about their Dark Defenders, and people asking what a DD is good for. The answer is "reading a newspaper in the middle of fifteen orange guys trying to kill you." You can get about a paragraph in before they hit you. To put this in Empath-specific terms: Fortitude means that your teammate gets hit, very roughly, about half as much. All by itself. Regeneration Aura means that everyone with range when you cast it heals THEMSELVES, with no work on your part, for an entire health bar in about 24 seconds. Adrenaline Boost means you've created a monster. There are occasional points when, yes, you will heal people. But mostly, from level 25 on, your team should be tough enough that you're doing mostly tuneups and not so much body work. "Who has the aggro" and questions like that are also less relevant in this environment.

Tanks in this game are ten times as tough as blasters. You will rarely need to watch the tank carefully. Watch the blasters. Watch them CLOSELY.

The market is very "hollow" -supply is terrible at levels below max. Both sides are bad, though redside has always been worse than blue.

By the way, if anyone has a sub-38 Celerity or Unbounded Leap stealth, I'm willing to pay quite a lot for it.

... new to me. You should be able to slot it just fine. Maybe they broke something with supersidekicking?

10-14 you're guaranteeing that almost everything is junk, and a very few are very good. I don't know if there's anything in the middle.

Your definite goods are going to be -KB (steadfast and karma), steadfast res/def, Regenerative Tissue +regen.

A quick look for "possibles" gives me these, which I'd at least look up before tossing:
Eradication
Kismet +Acc
Theft of Essence
Basilisk's Gaze
Blessing of the Zephyr
Rectified Reticle
Shield Breaker
Cloud Senses

[unsourced opinions follow] It does provide for elegant numbers. And a level 25 IO is better than a level 25 SO when you hit level 26 and beyond.

Possibly it was a way of saying "SO's are not TOTALLY obsolete." If I'm paying close attention to performance, I go with 15 and 20 IO's, 25 SO's [another set so I'm white through 26] and then 30 IO's. Normally I'm not that fussy so I run DO's through 22, SO's at 22 and 27, then frankenslot at 32 or nearby.

Last I checked people were recommending 35-39 for merit rolls with 10-14 as a strong minor,assuming you're rolling at level 50.

Buying directly (Luck of the Gambler +Rech, Blessing of the Zephyr -KB, Miracle or Numina unique at minimum level) was a bad deal last time I looked. I'm rooting for random rolls, but like Nate Silver, I try to keep a clear separation between my desires and my observations.