Fulmens

Hmm. Your goals and desires are completely skew to mine. . . that is, I can't really help you. I want to see more sub-50 recipes in the system, and more inf spent in general (less inf in circulation) and neither of those works for you.

There's two questions, really. One is storage - how do you store 100 billion inf, or whatever- and the other one is, once you GET 100 billion inf what do you do with it?

Storage: 15 slots on Wents stores 30 billion. 100 "100-million inf items" in a SG chest stores 10 billion. (Purples and certain PVP's cost more, but there's an potential ethical issue of creating scarcity there.) Actually, storing 100 billion inf is harder than I thought it would be.

I'm trying to think of interesting investment/charity opportunities. Something where you put in inf and get something out that's not inf, but is useful to you. It's odd to me that you don't want to even frankenslot your characters, but that's just a matter of us enjoying different things.

I've got this project. I run a cross-side, cross-server currency exchange service. Other people run contests for best base, and best AE arc. I was for a while trying to bribe people to roll their merits below level 50.

It takes something under 100 million inf to get Field Crafter- although if you actually sell your creations you can make money at it. I don't know if you'd find the portable crafting table a useful convenience, but it's something to do with your money. You can do various things to trade money for convenience during the process (buying all the recipes at the table, overpaying for your salvage, destroying everything you make as you make it, etc.) so cost is quite variable.

You could find a base designer you like and pay them to redesign your base.

I recently bought a costume code (Knives of Artemis) for 1.5 billion infamy.

I started the last SG-only team with 100 million inf for each of us, so we wouldn't have to stress about quality of life things like buying KB protection IO's.

... does your base have a full set of tier 3 inspirations in the insp chests? OK, that's only going to burn maybe 10 million inf. I'm out of ideas.

I will also mention that /Ice and /Mental have good ranged effects and few/skippable melee attacks. Not "no" melee effects, but stuff you can live without.

For the respec mission, since this is heroside: First respec (exemp to 33), the contact is at the end of Victory Bridge. Not the end with the reactor, the other end. Second respec, the contact is in Founders, northern edge of one of the northeastern islands (farthest north you can get and still have buildings- guy in a uniform.)

You do around three missions, culminating in saving the city from nuclear death, and you are offered your choice of respec or merits.

If you enjoy whacking Council, you enjoy whacking Council. But if you don't... 18 million an hour, that's about 50 hours to get to this kinda money.

There may be faster ways.

EDIT: For instance, I just bought two recipes for 23 million (each), instantly buying them, added 2.5 million of instabought salvage, crafted (.5 million) and listed for 43 million. Last 5 sales are 50-60 million and they're all in the last 24 hours. If I get ONLY what I asked, instead of the 50 million I expect, that's 26 million in, 4.3 million to Mr. Wentworth and 12.7 million profit. I did it twice, so call it 25 million inf in less than 20 minutes' work (with roughly a 24 hour delay for inf delivery.) And that's villainside, where it's relatively hard to make money.

As I said, they changed something important. I think it was killing the "unresistable" tag on those grenades.

The question I ask is a slightly different one: How much do you need?

I come from a background of playing a lot of force fielders, and there are times that more Defense, or more layers of protection, are simply not needed.

If you get to only 25% to all, you've just doubled your survivability. In emergency cases, whatever those might be, you can take a single small purple and double your survivability AGAIN.

I don't know if you're gunning for Ruladek the Strong (or whatever), but if you're playing relatively normal content and losing by a little bit, making yourself twice as hard to kill should solve the problem.

Consider a softcapped SR scrapper with Tough and Health. They've got about 15x the survivability of a no-defense no-resist character, and recover their health in 133 seconds.

With 25% Defense, roughly 50% average Resistance, and decent slotting on Dark Regeneration, you have 4x the survivability of a n-d-n-r character and recover your health in about 15 seconds. Survivability goes up proportionately if you're stunning lots of minions.

Is that "over the lifetime of a 1-50 character"? Or "in the 40-50 game?" Or what? I'm curious because it seemed for a long time that the Dev's answer to "make it harder" was "put in more exotic damage and dirty tricks" (see: sappers, Mother Mayhem, Master Illusionists, Arachnos everything.) and they finally started to try to rebalance things with, for instance, Cimerorra.

OP said

doubleposting because I missed the end of the second page...

docbuzzard said

80M down.
920M to go!

Health is an excellent place for it. It will be up all the time in that case. If you put it in O2 Boost, it will only be up for 2 min after each time you put O2 boost on someone (no stacking.)

Server transfer fee is just the Wents 10%. You give it to me, I put something up for sale, I buy it on another character, I give you the remainder. No profit for me- I'm just doing this, because I've done it dozens of times and if you're doing it for the first time you might screw up and lose the money.

Side fee is 20% for most servers, 10% for my "home servers" (Infinity, Victory, Pinnacle). 10 gets you 8, or 10 gets you 9 depending. This should make a 10% profit for me (unless my money's gotten out of synch in which case I break even +/- 1% ) ; the extra 10% is because at some point I'm going to have to move the money to another server. There's a free server transfer with that- if you want to give me influence on Freedom and get infamy on Champion, it's the same "10 gets ya 8" deal.

@Boltcutter in game.

EDITED: I checked with Smurphy, who for a very long time was the go-to guy for this, and he's quitting for a while due to the TF changes. I don't know anyone else in the biz besides me.

Villains have always been hard mode in my mind, yes. CoH was a lot easier than it was intended to be- especially in I1 through I4. (If you're new, I knew a guy who herded up SEVEN HUNDRED FREAKS once. )

One thing I noticed which MAY make Trick Arrow "look better" on paper:

Flash Arrow has a 60 second duration. Given a lot of recharge and debuff slotting, you could stack it 6 or 7 times, at 10% (evencon; 8% on +2) per time, on a badguy without aggroing them. So AV's would get easier over the course of the fight, and any time you had to spend a MINUTE setting up a fight would be pretty easy. Obviously, in a world where my teams wipe out a spawn in under ten seconds this is not a normal playstyle.

I'd be happy to accept a 30 second duration if it would allow a more significant debuff. Something that I would actually be willing to say "Yeah, you can fire two Flash Arrows before I take that alpha."

I'm not disagreeing with any of the points mentioned upstream, just offering a balance point and a fix.

There was much Dark Astoria arguing about this, but the general conclusion was that enemies have to be green-con or better to drop anything (so -2 minions, -3 lieuts, -4 bosses.)

I'll buy 10 random rolls from you for 100 million inf. You get the guaranteed money and I get whatever you roll.

You don't even have to wait for level 50, I'll do it right now.

I'm @Boltcutter in game- lemme know when you play, what server you're on and what your global is.

My theory has always been that Force Fields was a badly designed set, and the Devs would really have liked to replace it, except for the "cottage rule". (If you log in one day and Build Up produces a small cottage, you're not going to be happy.) It is the weakest, or close to the weakest, offensive set available to Defenders. It's got three KB powers (ok, one now does damage) and one Repel power, but the only buff it gives is +Defense (And so much the rest of the team doesn't need to provide any.) Does not buff endurance, resistance, damage, recharge; does not debuff enemies in any way. It's been redesigned and rebalanced several times over the years. It's VERY limited in what it does.

I have three high level FF defenders, so I like what it does... but I would not call it a design success.

When it came time to put Corruptors together, they gave 'em Ice instead. I think they'd honestly like Force Fields to quietly go away.

Wish I'd thought of ESDF five years ago. Old dog, new tricks...

You can't fix stupid, in the general case.

Few points:

1) I believe any blaster that HAS both Build Up and Aim available, and doesn't take them both, is a broken build. (AR and Dev are an entirely different flamewar.) Earlier you get them, the happier you'll be. (+100% damage when you've got 95% slotted is a lot different from +100% damage when you have 16% slotted.)

2) Chilling Embrace is not IMO useful for a Blaster. It works only while you're in melee range (of, say, Freak Tanks or Rikti swords), and mitigates very little damage. I don't like to stay in melee range unless I have two or three really big hitting melee attacks, and then I'll be on my way once I've dropped them off.

3) Shiver, on the other hand, is wonderful. Puts enemies most of the way to the Rech floor, by itself on the first application. The only problem I have is that it's sometimes TOO big- it's nearly a half circle, huge radius, and sometime it aggros people you can barely see.

4) Speaking of the Recharge floor (-75% recharge)- one major question should be what you want to choose to put them there. You have a lot of options- Shiver, Ice Storm, Frost Breath- and you don't need to take ALL of them. (Ice Patch is another defense technique, which you may not turn out to need.)

Hope I'm not discouraging... Ice/Ice is fun. The only "complaint" I have is that there are so many good tools, I don't have enough TIME to use them all.

I have a vision of Back Alley Brawler putting this on his list below "Dual Bows" and "Shield Offense".