Fulmens

I had an idea for a "relatively loot-free" PVP environment a while back. It turns out that it doesn't really solve a problem that actually exists, perhaps for anyone but me.

My thing about PVP is that if a new PVP'er plays an experienced PVP'er they will get hammered flat, and that's as it should be. The same is true of bridge, of chess, of a variety of traditional games. And yet bridge and chess and scrabble have found ways to pit people of like skill and interest against each other, in a situation where they have fun.

I haven't found that in PVP here. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough. There are just too many challenges to overcome at once to get someone interested.

1) new rules set
2) new skill set
3) new build, taking weeks and costing billions
4) Appropriate- level enemies

I have to master all of these things without any guarantee that, after putting in 50 hours and 5 billion inf, I'll actually enjoy the results of my work.

At least if I want to try folk dancing, or ice sculpture, or kendo, I can find out I hate it pretty quickly.

As a peripheral point, this is why a lot of people list for prices like 124,600,908 or 125,810,666 or something... the first will sell before the "125,000,000" people. The second will sell after the 125,000,000 people but nobody's going to guess the exact price, so we'll sell for 130,000,000 or more.

Werner: It's been my experience that when a price does head south, it does not do so smoothly.

People tend to prop up their buy/sell points until they realize there's a real problem and they've accumulated stuff instead of money.

Then they get out, and abandon their buy point. Sometimes they leave their sell points up for a while.

Next time you see some common salvage with, like, 3K for sale and 150 bids, buy up a bunch of them and store around a hundred. You will probably find a huge gap where prices go from "under ten thousand" to "over fifty thousand." Someone tried to set a high price and support it, and it didn't work. Put the hundred salvage back at a variety of prices from 1 to 10K or so. Or don't and let the market go insane.

Two Emp/Sonics, no Fitness, full Leadership?

I got around my Force Field prejudices by building a Sonic/Dark with Maneuvers and slotting some -ToHit in the cones. It's not the same, but it'll do. And the 55% team res doesn't HURT.

This is an interesting question for me because I have run FF through all of these, and I've run Rad through most of 'em. So I don't think "Who would I invite", I think "who would I bring". I can't talk much about cold/ice because I don't have the experience with it. But I have a decent amount of experience with, if not the exact combo (I do have FF/Elec as it happens) all the other secondaries and all the primaries mentioned.

For Katie? I would vote Force Fields. FF is the set that, when stuff goes wrong, people still don't die. Rad , yeah, you can take down Mary guaranteed. But defensively, Rad won't hit all the witches and when everyone's getting bounced, stunned, debuffed, and abused... Rad may not keep the toggles up.

FF is idiotproof and Mary's little clique makes everyone act like an idiot.

Lady Grey, I tend to think you can do with any of the above. At Lady Grey level you're going to have a team that can take care of itself, and beat the tough things, and work with whatever you bring. (And statistically you're going to have at least one fire/kin.) Personal taste. Sonic/Sonic has a couple significant advantages- practically nobody brings +Res, and half of everyone has capped Def, and you bring the other half of "I can stand here until you run out of bullets. " Your team's outbound damage goes through the roof against tough targets; something like -70% Resist is barely trying. Sonic/Sonic is a very good SECOND defender/controller. Sonic and Force Fields, Sonic and Rad, Sonic and Dark, Emp, anything you can think of makes your team indestructible and incredibly hard-hitting. Sonic by itself... not quite.

For Dr. Khan, I haven't done it enough to make solid judgements. I think rad/rad or sonic/sonic, because you need to pour on the -res to get your damage up.

One thing where my prejudices probably show is that I wouldn't bring the Empath to any of those. A lot of that is early training- I've got a 3.5 minute timer in my head and when that goes off, I want to rebubble EVERYONE. Empathy has things on a bunch of different timers, and you're hitting this person with Clear Mind and that person with Fortitude, and everyone's so NEEDY all the time. Also, people thank Empaths when they die and get rezzed. As far as I'm concerned, that's an abusive relationship. When I play Force Fields, and someone's health drops to the halfway point, they're in some sort of severe trouble and I check to see what's going on. Empathy, people drop to half health like it's no big thing.

Empathy has some really good moves. Psi has solid damage and a startling amount of mitigation. (You can stack up those psychic screams and enemies don't get to shoot back until judgement day. ) It's probably a very good combination. It's just not something I'd ever think to bring to a TF.

Edit: New Dawn- I know exactly what you're saying. I kind of make a point of bringing "the first seven people that say yes." I've only gotten bit by it once, and that was a Manticore where we had some odd combo (one scrapper, no other melee maybe?) and I didn't go through and explain how I thought we should play it. We teamwiped in the third room and half the team bailed.

How much do you want me to match? I should probably be saving my money in case I come up with some sort of legal in-game bribe associated with this, but if it's just 50 million or so I can probably free that up. (Real money transactions are bad. Even charity based ones.)

My personal theory was always that you couldn't BUY IT NAO at level 35-49, and that was what kept the 50's prices up there.

I got a lot of possible theories.

1) This is a small enough market that one person, or a few people, could make a difference. If PumBumbler decided to, he could crash the entire level 50 Rare IO market for at least a week. Maybe someone started their SG on a "Best Farmer" competition. Maybe someone with a lot of stuff decided to leave the game and sell everything. EVERYTHING! Maybe someone's spouse got mad at them, like the urban legend goes. Maybe someone got invited to an SG with bad permissions and looted the purple bin.

2) The market is chaotic. There didn't even need to be one deliberate action by someone. Maybe someone lost a zero, listed for 14 million, then someone else came on with a new purple and listed for the last sale price, then someone lost their nerve and dumped their supply.

3) There's been a longrunning theory around there that "purple prices are bound to drop now that people are leaving AE." Maybe they did drop. I remember from watching rare salvage prices back when a "quick Katie" was ten minutes- and when they transitioned to a 40 minute Katie, salvage prices didn't drop gradually. They stayed at the old level for a while, as the people who'd been flipping them supported their old price points and inventory started growing dangerously. Then they went from, like, 4 million to 1.5 million in a week.

In two of these cases, supply will drop and demand will rise. In the third, demand will not rise faster than supply until something fundamental changes in the game (I don't know, the Devs halve Purple drop rates by accident or a REALLY GOOD level 30 TF opens up or something.)

I have no idea what you get when you slot for intangibility. I may have tried it once, in 2005, but if I did I don't remember what the results were.

I always figured my Stalker was an "efficiency expert." Having trouble with, oh, Longbow Nullfiers? Lemme optimize that for ya.

It occurred to me that, while I can move currency red to blue, any US server to any other US server, I don't have the ability to exchange to European servers.

Is there anyone out there who might go into the business, if I need to extend my tentacles off the North American continent for some reason?

I hope you get the direct trade. If you can't, I have a worse option.

I exchange influence for infamy and vice versa, at a worse rate than 1:1. (Around half of the fee goes to wentworth's, the other half to me. ) So you could sell the redside IO's, I could exchange the money, and you could use the money to buy the blueside IO's.

Like I said, the direct trade would be a better deal for all concerned.

Katten: I see no reason why this would have to be experimentally determined. The theoretical "pylon time" currently is quite close to measured pylon times, I think. Werner, BillZBubba and Arcanaville would have a better feel for that.

We've got good models, is what I'm saying.

OP: It's hard to say how to weight radius and max targets. Pardon me while I think in public.

1) Clearly, max=5 vs. max=10 is a much more significant effect than max=10 vs. max=16. Even a +0/x2 spawn (what we used to call "tenacious") can go over 5 enemies, while often "full team" spawns are under 10 enemies.

And I agree that area is disproportionate to "effective" area- that is, a 20' effect is not four times as useful as a 10' effect. Radius might be a good measure.

2) For toggles, I'd use "tick time" rather than activation time; we may be talking about the same number here. It takes (according to Red Tomax) 3.47 seconds to start up Death Shroud but it ticks every 2 seconds.

3) I've looked at your sample numbers and I think there's something off about either your math or your formula.

Fistful of Arrows is half the recharge of Ball Lightning and is a 50' cone at a 30 degree arc, so 1/12 the area of a 50' radius AOE, so about 50'/3.5 radius or close to a 15' radius sphere. No calculators were beaten in the making of this estimate.

So about half the cycle time, about the same damage (scale 0.91 vs scale 1.02), about the same "radius". Should have about twice the rating. And yet it's got a 304 vs. a 59. Did you include that Ball Lightning has multiple pulses over time?

4) I'm thinking that activation time MAYBE should be disproportionately represented. On one hand, there's "dead time" between spawns (so maybe reduce "Effective recharge" by 3 seconds?) On the same hand, you've also got... not an attack chain, exactly, of AOE, but definitely you can fire a second AOE and shrink the dead time between AOE's. Well, if you're Assault Rifle you can have an AOE attack chain... or maybe fire/mental/elec.

On the other hand I got nothing, but I feel like I'm overlooking something.

Generally, Scrappers that can kill AV's are at the bleeding edge of performance. They do just barely more damage than the AV regenerates, resulting in fights that go 10, 20 minutes... I think someone on the Scrapper forums has a video of a fight that went three hours. The AV lost. However, Scrappers who solo AV's tend to play by rigorous self-inflicted rules. "No shivans or other temp powers" is sort of the baseline, with serious soloers going to "No inspirations".

It is very difficult to build such a scrapper if you start with concept and then try to build for AV killing.

However, you can use both Katana and Dual Blades to solo AV's- Werner, expert on the topic, started out with Dual Blades/SR I believe. (My only AV soloing experience is a Ninja/Ninja Stalker who got Countess Crey and, so far, failed on Lilitu and Positron. On the other hand, that was at level 43, so I had no purples; I consider this a respectable start.)

I don't know if any Tanks have soloed AV's- it would seem to me that it would be considerably harder, because Tanks are giving away 20% of their DPS(and DPE) right off the bat. Still, someone has probably done it. Heck, a BLASTER soloed Lord Nemesis and that's a pretty impressive acheivement.

Building an AV soloer is a pretty technical achievement -at least in the melee classes. There are Ill/Rad controllers who just wake up one morning and decide to take out the entire Praetorian community, I'm sure, but scrappers and such have to work at it.

I just checked out "Walk" on men and women and I didn't see the male walk as particularly... feminine. Then I thought that maybe an eight foot tall Huge-build Frost Giant with a big ol' beard might be throwing me off... so I tried it on a relatively normal guy. Still looked fine to me.

Maybe I'm way too in touch with my feminine side? Or something.

My "girl's got an SG to feed" girl loves her Walk, though. (She used to make her living by getting tips from wealthy 40-something blasters for force fielding them. The bad ol' days before Wents. ) It's like Sands of Mu- good to have around even if she never actually needs to use it.

OP: Whenever someone new comes to the forums, I restrict myself to mentioning one thing they should know.

You might want to do the same... one unrequested piece of advice per night. It's amazing how much fun you can have even if you're not perfectly optimized and deeply knowledgeable about the game. Sometimes there are problems (my first character was a scrapper who didn't have mez protection till level 33 or so... my second was an En/Fire blaster. That's a terrible combination TODAY- imagine it when the tier 1 took twice as long to go off.) But sometimes there's really only RAR! and BOOM! and STAB! and WIN!

If there's RAR! and BOOM! and STAB! and LOSE! you might want to roll up a support character for duoing. Rad/Sonic defenders are justly famous.

The Shadow Shard. Last thing in the game that's still hard for people.

Invuln tanks with significant IO'd up psi resist and def do OK. That's the best my wife and I could come up with, of what we've brought.

Usually there's ONE type of something that causes troubles. Like Wisps (with the Psi) for Invuln, or eyeballs for SR. (Well, everyone takes twice as much damage, but SR takes like ten times as much damage...)

Dark has a lot of resist to things that nobody else resists, so it may be a good choice. It'll stop the psi, it can heal with some frequency, although the Brutes may just squish you flat. . .

Shadow Shard's going to be hard no matter what you bring. Maybe granite tanks?

EDIT: I did surprisingly well with a FF/Elec defender in there, but it wasn't FAST. They hate end drain in the shadow shard. So some sort of Elec, maybe?

Huge difference between "enemies at the -runspeed cap" and "enemies at both -runspeed and -recharge cap". I'm not saying that -rrunspeed is useless, but 1/4 the incoming firepower is my personal priority.

Nihilii: Nothing's stopping you from bringing Child's Play to your own country, wherever that may be. They started in Seattle with, I think, three hospitals. Now there's one in England, a number in Canada, in Australia, and it looks like one in Egypt.

Everything starts somewhere.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation spends most of its money in central and southern Africa. Assuming that you're somewhere else than Africa, do you take that personally as well?

I use "Esc" to clear my current target and then "tab" seems to start with the nearest enemy. Don't do what I do. Ctl-Tab is a better option because "Esc" puts away weapons. I've got five years of bad habits, and I always forget that Ctl-Tab even works.