Fulmens

It's true. Other people probably should roll at 50. I would buy "under-50" rolls except I don't think anyone's selling.

Edit to clarify: If you have 20 (to 200) merits, you're under level 50, and you want cash instead of risk, I'll pay 8 million per roll, in advance, for whatever you get.

*points to miniguide in sig*

... all my blueside teams look like your descriptions of redside teams...

Glad that worked out for you.

There's a couple tricks to the second one- otherwise it is possible to accidentally buy something from a low bidder instead of from your other character. May not be likely, but to be absolutely sure you get your own inf you can go here and see how intercepts can happen, and how to avoid them.

I roll everything at 33 (and again as appropriate, later) but I don't run guys up the levels that much these days. So I don't help much.

I agree with the people who say "Why are you worried about helping a pair of TANKS survive?" Kinetics, Blaster, or some other big damage dealer. If not Kinetics: Rad is better on offense, I think, than Dark- it has +recharge and +recovery and +damage and +to hit, as well as -res .

I'd run a Fire/Mental blaster, myself, but I have almost as many level 50 blasters as level 50 "Everything else". Blasters mitigate 100% of incoming damage and they do it in a serious hurry.

Hmm. Original question has been answered. Should I blather on? Yeah.... I think I should. Oversimplifications follow.

Defense works better at the top end, for almost everyone, than Resistance. There's a lot of Defense available through a lot of sources, making it easier to GET to the top end.

However, once Defense is "capped" more does nothing. The same is true for Resistance, but there are fewer ways to increase your Resistance, and the ones that exist tend to increase your Resistance less, so it's less likely to come up.

From which one may conclude that Resistance is "more likely to be useful" than Defense. Depends how likely you are to be buffed, I guess.

If you're not going to use that nit, can I pick it?

June.

I misinterpreted the title and thought you were starting a new club to go with the #9 club.

Congrats!

I was feeling like this was just "2XP hangover, slamming into ToT madness" but now I'm starting to think there's a real change. A lot of it might be people making decisions based on the huge amount of money out there. Like "I'm not even going to sell it if it's less than a million" decisions. It seems like the 20K-50K stuff is now 100-150K, as mentioned by everyone else. I don't know if that's enough of a reward to get people to actually sell it, though. . . heck, the spread on expensive salvage was a million this morning. (something was "Buy for 1.5 million,sell for 2.5 million." ) People are throwing money at the wrong things. Maybe I should up my "minimum price paid for recipe" to 250K from 55K. It's the closest I can get to the currency loofah I really want.

Did someone speak my name thrice? Oh. Only twice. Darnit.

Touch of Death prices may have gone up or down - I don't follow that specific set, because when I was doing a lot of marketing prices were all over the place, and there were plenty of things that WERE guaranteed money instead. What we know from the Big Page Of Info:

Acc/Dam and Dam/Rech are relatively common. (One drops relatively frequently from baddies and one is a doorbuster.) Acc/Dam in particular should be relatively cheap.
Dam/End and "Chance for damage" are uncommon baddie drops. Right now should be a great time to pick those up, because essentially everyone in CoH is out farming in the streets. Put in bids over the weekend.

It's a BAD time to pick up the two triples, because (as mentioned) everyone is out farming in the streets and nobody's in AE or Task Forces. However... they'll be back. Patience good.

In the general "buying" case- Squez is right, the prices on things below max level are much, much tinier than the prices at max level (or next to it.)

Like the "level 40" price for any given Touch of Death triple is probably five times the "level 36" price. It really does work almost exactly as well. The annoying thing is, you get as many level 40s as level 20-39 combined. So shotgunning out a lot of bids on lower levels will work... eventually.

If you do get extras, though, you can generally craft them and sell them for up to twice as much as you paid for the original. If you're thinking "I can buy two, sell one and nearly break even!" - you can. No guarantees on pricing, you may get burned, but if you want it chances are someone else does too. Someone with a lot more money than you, even.

Warren Buffet likes to say "The market is a mechanism for moving wealth from the active to the patient. " In CoH, "patient" means "willing to wait as much as three days."

Good luck!

OP said

You had a level 5 blaster for long enough to calculate the damage? Huh. What happens when you get SK'd up to level 38 on a normal mission, with Crey and Nemesis? What happens when you shoot at a Freak Tank?

Right.

The assumption there is that you're going to hit 27 and slot everything instantly all at once. As mentioned by Rodion, you don't necessarily have to do that.

Let's see what we CAN 'instantly' hold and use- these may not be exactly correct- just as a sort of personal challenge.

* 10 personal tray slots
* about 12 personal recipe slots
* about 32 personal salvage slots
* about 16 Went slots
* about 30 vault salvage slots

The best case is that we can store 58 or so salvage at Wents (10 each alchems, improvs, and bones; 9 each runes and demons; 8 circuit boards.) This takes up six went-slots. And then we could craft ten items, each of which uses a recipe and three pieces of salvage, and store those in our tray. We've handled 10 recipes and 88 salvage, leaving us room for the extra salvage on our person and in the vault; the recipes are going to overflow.

Even that is unrealistic, because those recipes are going to use some of that salvage- so we could store, I dunno, 42 pieces in 6 went-slots and still craft 10 in advance?
That gives us
42 in wentworth's
30 crafted
32 stored on our person
30 stored in the vault
_____
134 salvage.

Salvage: shouldn't be much of a problem. This doesn't even include the factoid that you can pick up at least 12 of those (the Improvised Cybernetics) at bargain basement prices any time you want. Runes are USUALLY cheap as well.
Recipes, that's going to be the bottleneck. Maybe.

I count 19 generic recipes on that list. 44-19 = 25. 10 of those 25 are the "pre-crafted" ones. I don't know which ones on that list are massively oversupplied- if 5 of those are oversupplied, those can be picked up for a few K each when the time comes.

It's been a very long time since I tried to operate on anything like this tight a budget. The 6,000,000 inf man was the last time I did this.

I remember (possibly inaccurately) that it's the big things that kill you, and most of the big things here are crafting costs. If you paid 10K more for each generic recipe, that adds 190K to the total cost of the project, for instance. If you replaced one of your PBAOE Acc/Dam pairs with an Acc and a Dam, you'd probably end up spending LESS. (Yes, there's a slight loss of performance. )

So if you have no SG, and you ding by flying over that location badge in the Steel Canyon university with a full load of salvage and recipes, and decide you're not going to stab another Freak until you're all set up... you can probably do it that afternoon, not counting your (considerable) prep time.

I'd much rather have an SG bin to use, myself.

Desitre: With two emp/sonics, you're BOTH the damage and BOTH the support. The simple answer might be the wrong one here. Without someone putting Adrenaline Boost on you permanently, you can't get Adrenaline Boost on someone permanently. For instance.

120% -Resist is a lot more than 60% -Resist. Fortitude + two Assaults, that's about 70% +Damage on both of you.

It's pretty severe.

I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who's NOT a 5-year vet and a numbers geek. This is hard for me. Hope I'm not too patronizing.

When you get to level 22, the game starts looking considerably different. I'm going to start with that statement. You will at some point have more attacks than time to use them, unlike the early game where you occasionally have pauses with no attack recharged, and you start being able to play with things like "slotting recharge into the good attacks" and such.

Once you get into serious powergaming mode, you can do some DRAMATICALLY different things to a power- half or a third the recharge time, full damage and (sometimes) extra bonus pain stacked on there.

In the serious powergaming mode, among people who do stuff like solo archvillains, Dark Melee is one of the preferred sets. It has a couple VERY fast-activating, hard hitting attacks, it does a nonstandard damage type, it's trendy and cool.

I don't like DM because Shadow Maul, one of the signature attacks, annoys me. Mathwise, good attack. Look and feel, I don't enjoy it. But it's a GOOD attack and you get it about level 2.

For Dark Blast- it's a different attack set from most. It's better on defense and slightly worse on offense, in my opinion- but I play a lot of Fire Blast (which has NO defense and a TON of offense.)

A lot of it comes down to feel- if you're not enjoying what you are playing, try something else. This game is not about 49 levels of waiting for the good stuff, it's not about sacrificing your fun for team success. . . play something that makes you happy.

... or you could use Bonesmasher. Same speed as AS, roughly 2.5 times the damage. It's proximity defense, BLASTER STYLE.

Snfffff... the sweet smell of capital intelligently applied. Smells like America on a good day.

One question: How much savings do you think people get from having SG storage space available to them? Cause the "buy in advance and be patient" thing, which I recommend, only works if you have places to store stuff. Just occurred to me.

0 for sale 1200 to buy sounds like "high level salvage."

Right now there's a CHUNK TON of pool A and salvage being generated, not so much of anything else, because everyone's in the streets beating up hundreds and thousands of badguys.

Wait for a week after the Halloween event ends, see how things look. There's a lot of ToT levels being gained right now.