Fulmens

I'd tend towards Fire/Energy blaster, on the theory that "everyone's a tank at level 10", but I will admit that the firebreath/fireball spawn-clearing goodness is kinda hard on endurance. (Both FB's and Build Up by level 8, if I recall.)

Classic example of "it looks better on an NPC than it does on us."

Let's say there was a "russian roulette" power- 1 in 6 times it kills the user, 1 in 6 times it kills the target, 4 in 6 times it does nothing.

If you normally win 19 out of 20 fights (most players do this well or better) it's a terrible thing for a player to use.

But it's also a terrible thing for a player to fight against because you only win 5 times out of 6 against it.

20 million for a respec? go back about... six months.

Before the last 2XP, they were around 90 million each if I recall .

I pretty much deal in what I consider "middle of the road expensive" (everyone thinks they're normal) items- in the 5-10 million inf range - and currently it is normal for the crafted items to sell for two to three times the cost of ingredients and crafting. People are roughly doubling their money after the wentfee, in other words.

I would say that a "moderate" scaling wentfee (or tax if you prefer) wouldn't dent profits much.

A thought-experiment VAT would be interesting- questions like "If I buy 8 Alchemical Silvers at 55908 and 2 at 100K, do they get charged as an average cost?" and "if I sell at a loss, what happens?"

I suspect what would happen would be that most of the "buy it nao" types would steamroller ahead as if nothing had changed. The total amount of inf in the system might slowly drop. On the other hand, PVP recipes purely delete inf from the system (you generate NO inf while generating them) and those had very little visible effect on inf or on prices.

As a practical thing I still think it's "more bugs and overhead than it's worth" but it's an interesting idea.

Is the big money still zone PVP? I don't keep track of these things.

I've done business with Smurphy. For what that's worth.

We just wanted to get a screenshot with "0 bids" on Luck Charms. We didn't make it... spontaneously unloading several thousand LC's takes a surprisingly long time.

Edited to add: Yes, the price of luck charms went kinda crazy for the next few weeks. They went from nice, consistent, 40K to 60K, items to "511 /100,000/100,000/511/511" kinda prices. Not unlike what we see now.

PK: Obviously you should have kept back a hundred and dribbled them back into the market at 251 inf each.

Keep havin' fun with your money!

I think the idea, and I'd love clarification from Snakebit on this, is something like "5% fee on anything under 100K, 10% from 100K to a million, 15% for anything over a million." It might be more complex, with only profits being taxed- so if you bought something for a million and sold it for 1.1 million you'd be charged on the .1 million- but I don't know.

I don't have a philosophical problem with a progressive tax- tell me the rules of the game and I'll play it- but a tax on value added seems like a lot of invisible work (and much opportunity to introduce subtle, painful bugs) for very little visible benefit.

I personally don't understand farming. When I beat the game, I turned the difficulty up, not down.

Tangentially, I think the generally accepted wisdom is to use Firebreath, Fireball in that order for enemies to drop fastest.

I use Fireball first, because I have been trained by years of knockback to get the next attack going as soon as possible.

Eryq2 apparently missed the part where it said

I approve of market activities that interest and amuse you.

Sometimes you can find a "high water mark" where someone tried to corner the market, realized that they couldn't keep up with incoming supply, and abandoned their attempt. I remember taking offense to a supply of several thousand ... something, villainside (coulda been Ceramic Armor) and after buying the first 1200 the price spiked up abruptly from 5K to 100K or something.

By the way, Luck Charms... are a trap.

An AOE attack is about 3 times the endurance of a single-target attack.

I'm going to ask a couple of basic questions- I don't mean to patronize, but you did mention you're new to the game:

1) Do you have Stamina? This makes a large difference on Endurance.
2) Are you using Fire Breath? Are you hitting the whole group with it? One problem, (especially seen when someone comes from melee characters, but can come from anywhere) is when someone "tab targets" to the closest critter in a spawn, hits Fire Breath, and runs toward them. This results in an AOE that only hits one person, making it look like a slow, overpriced singletarget attack.
3) Do you have Aim? Despite what it says on the box, it's most useful as a moderate damage buff. Difference between wiping out even-con minions and wiping out +1s.

Fireball/Fire Breath, as mentioned, should drop an entire spawn of even-con minions if used right. I'm not a big fan of Rain of Fire because it kills badguys slower than badguys kill me.

I'm not a huge fan of /Devices so I won't discuss that side of the equation.

MutantX: you seem to be saying one thing and proving another.

A Fire/MM may not do as much damage as a Controller with a capped fireball. (I think Mid's has to be showing Containment, because a controller at cap without containment should be doing about as much as a Blaster without BU/Aim. )

But the Controller doesn't generally get Fire Breath (of the two AOE's, that's the big hitter) and Psychic Scream.

So ignoring Defense, damage goes to the Blaster. You should be able to drop +2 minions with no buffs, 1-2-3.

The safety side, I agree, is where the Controller is far, far ahead. High regen will not stop an alpha, and getting that high regen is a suicide run without something like an AOE sleep.

Stately, plump Buck Salinger may send you to Cadeo. Or may send you to the entire Croatoa chain, who will then potentially send you to Cadeo.

That's a guess on my part, though.

The "What level to roll" question is kind of interesting. I was going to produce about 20 rare recipes at one point and asked on the forums. Level 33 was most popular in my unscientific survey, with a lot of people saying "Anything from 30-35" or "anything from 30-40".

Game theory says that if two people who can't communicate are trying to meet up, they should both head for the most obvious place. Likewise, since many people can't afford the money or slots to cover all the levels in a range, buyers and sellers should try to meet up at the most obvious levels.

30 is "obvious" but a bit low for many people, as generic 30's are worse than +3 SO's.

33 is "max PVP level for set bonuses "(for whatever zone, I don't remember) - less important than it used to be, but still a major factor.

35 is a very good "obvious" level.

40 is "obvious" but I think it suffers from nearly-50 syndrome. I could be wrong.

45 definitely is nearly-50 and people are willing to wait, I think.

If there are any other "obvious" levels I'm not aware of them.

Edit for conclusion: I recommend 33, followed by 35, if you're not going to wait for 50.

I'm sort of anti-lightning-field... I haven't made it work for me, but I'm willing to believe that someone, somewhere, might have a style that is both efficient and effective using it. It is, as mentioned near the beginning of the thread, a TREMENDOUS tool for gaining aggro. 20' radius is larger than most of your teammates' aggro-grab tools, and since it ticks every two seconds you're constantly REMINDING people that they're mad at you.

For Short Circuit, my belief is that it's better to get 90-95% Rech and 95% End Drain and lose a little damage, if needed. I like Space Goat's slotting better than anything I could come up with, but here's my suggestion:

EndMod/Acc/Rech and EndMod/Rech from both Efficacy Adaptor and Performance Shifter, EndMod/Acc (or EndMod/End- there's already a high acc on Short Circuit) and Dam/Rech. That's 95%+ on EndMod and Recharge, 23%-ish Dam, 23%-ish End Reduction and 36% Acc with roughly level 35 IO's.

I don't use my Snipes much,but there is at least one conditional use I haven't seen mentioned: Seven second head start for the tank. TGIF (Tanks Go In First) is fine, if the tank actually GOES. If the tank can't get there in a seven second window... I'd rather die of incoming fire than old age.

Hmm. This is a bug, but I don't think it's the bug you think it is.

Looks like you're getting the "I haven't been introduced" message. To check what that message is, I talked to Crimson, Maria Jenkins, Harvey Maylor and Unai with a level 20-odd defender. Instead of referring me back to a current active contact, they referred me back to the Architect Studio Manager.

My theory is that the ASM shows as a contact for EVERY origin, and shows as high level. So if you'd normally be referred to your highest level natural contact, you get referred to the ASM. If you'd normally be referred to your highest level magic contact (Tobias Hansen, I think, for me) you get referred to the ASM. And so forth.

Edit: By "Referred" I don't mean "given as a new contact." I mean "Go back and talk to." I also don't have an explanation for why you're not getting your new contacts from your old contacts. I can confirm that, unless you have an introduction from an old contact, contacts do NOT show up on your map.

Because I can't shut up, I will suggest this: Your active contacts should include people who you've outlevelled, but who still have an introduction for you. Have you gone through your list of actives?

Flea suggested "Whenever you want to buy something for your character, buy 2 (or more), sell the extras for at least 20% more than you paid. "

Possibly a better approach is to compare price of crafting yourself and buying crafted; if favorable, buy two of everything, slot one and sell one. This might be too subtle for "foolproof market hints".

To the OP: Heraclea has a fundamental, (here) unstated axiom. As I understand it, she believes it is morally wrong to use the market to make a profit. I suspect that every other theorem of hers is logical and follows clearly from this axiom, but I have such trouble with the starting place that I can't follow any of the paths that start there.

For myself, as long as I or anyone else can buy for X and sell for 2X (or really anything greater than 1.1X) , the value of X doesn't matter that much to me. I can start from zero wealth and make enough to buy what I need at any point, so if my existing stocks of inf become valueless I don't care.

I think that you have several goals which, while overlapping, are not identical. "support the sub-50 market" and "Gain wealth" and "equip your character" (or in Heraclea's case, "equip your characters with the least possible use of the market") are not quite the same.

For instance, if you roll at level 33, or 35, you are supporting the sub-50 market and gaining [some] wealth. You are also equipping your character earlier than if you ran "SO's to fifty, then start playing with IO's" (a thought process that I do not share.) However, if you roll at level 50 you will probably get more money for a given recipe- and it will certainly sell much faster. So waiting till 50 is better for gaining wealth.

I'm not judging any of those goals, but I do want to clarify the differences between them so you know what you're aiming for and what you're giving up.

I hate to see "guaranteed buy" because there's a shortage of just about everything below level 50, so getting one guaranteed shiny instead of 12 randoms hurts the market even if it's financially sensible.

I started a "buy your random rolls" program, currently buying for 8 million apiece (so for 17 rolls, 136 million) - I give you the money, you make the rolls, you give me the results no matter what they are. I don't know if that's a fair price in this market or not - you can probably make more with the Miracle alone- but when I was doing it at 6 million, before issue 14, I was breaking even or slightly behind.

Maybe we could do something where you roll 17 times and I buy 16 of 'em, and you get to keep the best?

I'm @Boltcutter in game, or you can PM me on the forums, and we can set up a time and place if you want to do this.

I tend to agree with Panzerwaffen: there's a difference between "only one team can do Master of Thingy" and "any team can do Master of Thingy". It would be very, very hard to do MoSTF with eight force field/energy defenders. There's no resist debuff, there's no regen reduction and there's not much damage (on the offensive side) so you're going to have slow fights, and there's only one good layer of protection (on the defensive side) so people are going to get doubletapped eventually.

My dream team:

Some way of getting AV's to floored accuracy and severely reduced damage on one character with effective Taunting (most commonly "buffing a tank") or severely reduced acc and damage on the entire team with minimal Taunting (most commonly "force fields").

Some way of healing the hits that do get through (anything from firetank to "a blaster with Heal Other" to "everyone bring six big greens", depending on how many other layers of defense there are)

Resistance Debuffing

Damage

So that could be "sonic defender, force fields defender, five blasters and someone to stand in front." Could be three Dark/Sonic defenders and five scrappers with Maneuvers.

A near-zero idiot count (we've all done stupid things at SOME point) is also pretty important.