Fulmens

Ragman: A year ago that was "put up a bid for ten level 30 Recharge Reduction recipes for 1300 inf each, come back the next day, sell at vendor for 4000" (or whatever the level and price and sale price were.) Stuff that works RIGHT NOW won't necessarily work in the future.

Flipping generic IO's (I'd pick L35-40 end reduction, rech reduction, and healing as six to check out) is somethign that has worked since like day 3 of issue 9. My only problem in the "know nothing guide" is ... how, with no knowledge, do you know what price to pick as a buy and as a sell? This is my own ignorance: I have flipped about six generic IO's in my life and those were obvious slams (selling for 11000, normally sell for 300,000) and I knew the market very well.

Dammit, Warren Buffet is no longer driving old beaters, it turns out.

So my plan to show up in an 8-year-old Honda and say "See? Overcompensating for NOTHING" might be shot to hell.

What's the Buy it NAO price on one of these?

"There is a server-wide Help channel "

... I thought it was zonewide. I have not, myself, checked it.

Check the prices of the crafted IO's (and how many a day sell...) before you sell those recipes. If you make 3 million extra on every 3rd IO, that'll add up in a hurry. If you're generating the volume, you might as well make the money.

Stop! Don't flip!

... did that work? Huh.

Hey. I wrote TWO miniguides for the OP!

... check my sig.

I missed the "End of boss farms". Do you just mean "end of 45's doorsitting in AE while one 50 does the work"? Or was there more to it?

Stray Kitten said

Tyrek said

There are people who apparently want to be treated worse than I treat them. Someone paid 25 million last week for something I listed at 16 million. I think, according to the "golden rule", I'm doing fine, thanks.

I'm going to take JUST A MINUTE and try wearing the yellow snow on my ice/axe tanker.

... then I'm going to fix my psi blasts to match my rad coloring on my rad/psi defender.

The Invention System must have had, at some point, a design goal that said or implied, "Give people the ability to get this much power AND NO MORE."

I think stacking more than five of the same set bonus would be part of the "MORE" that they're talking about...

or are you suggesting that repealing the law of fives would NOT gain you any more power ?

Edited to note: There are a whole lot of sets that give the exact same bonus- a lot of 5% recharge, a lot of 1.5% HP - and it would be foolish to think that was an accident.

So Ding/Ding is pretty much a 60 second buff on ,what, a 2 to 6 minute timer?

I think the third change to "Buzzsaw builds" was that they changed all the .53 second attacks to be .83 seconds (or similar numbers). Anyway, the "Brawl-length attacks" got slower, which didn't significantly affect anything BUT buzzsaw builds.

(I thought that was the major change, but I didn't have a horse in that race so I wasn't following it.)

Interesting project! I'm glad you enjoyed it.Your conclusions (and playstyle) vary from my own, but there's a good reason I don't get to set the rules. ( Rule #47: No Mayonnaise. Ever. On anything. )

Heraclea, I realize you're describing your playstyle, not stating a case for discussion... but

Hydro: Would thinking of them as "roles" and not "players" avoid the need for Marketeer and Shifter? Not everyone plays the same role at all times; some people who start out as "frantic casual" come here and learn the benefits of strategic laziness, for instance. I will go through several different roles while playing the same character- starting my bankroll with a little bit of vendorer, then a little bit of flipper, then back to my usual crafting ways once I have a couple million to work with.

Stormfront_NA said:

Look! Dead horse!

At one point (around issue 6, so it may no longer be true; it may never have been a good approximation for all I know) I approximated Scrappers in their 30's as "six times tougher than a Blaster, discounting mez protection."

That's an awful lot to overcome with, perhaps, 1/3 more damage.

I tend to weight the 1-49 game as much or more than the level 50 game, because if your Blaster sucks at level 35 they're not GETTING to level 50. Set IO's only have a strong effect on gameplay at high levels, because most of the benefits (Ranged Defense, for instance) require free slots- ones that you're not using to 3-slot Stamina or 5-slot Inferno or otherwise giving powers the basic necessities- and those tend to only come up in the 40's. Epic shield? Level 45, with the slots.

My general view is "Blaster damage makes them more valuable to their teammates; their extreme squishiness is a penalty only to them."

Blasters have enough mitigation solo, and a team provides enough mitigation, only when everything goes right. If you're accuracy-capped, you still have about a 10% chance of missing one of the two holds required to freeze a boss in place. If you're teamed with an Empath who is putting Fortitude on the granite tank, and figures that you should know your place and not get shot at, you're not going to be able to do your damage fully and freely.

I has been a long time since I've played a blaster on a PUG. Maybe I'll do that today, and let you know how it goes.

Saffron: I'm guessing that you're an Empath playing in the 20's or 30's. I'm going to give a canned response, and I apologize in advance if I'm telling you things you already know.

The game tends to change dramatically somewhere around level 30, maybe a little lower or higher. Your tanks and scrappers are VERY much tougher than your "squishies"- and the incoming damage ramps up dramatically to pose a threat to the "Crunchies".

The result tends to be that if you're thinking in terms of "healing as protection" then the blasters and defenders tend to go from green to black in about four seconds, and you're locked into a game of twitch reflexes that, eventually, you're going to lose.

You may notice that in the 20's and 30's Empathy gets a lot more "proactive" buffs- Fortitude being a classic. Fortitude on 3 other people tends to fix a lot of the squishiness.

Clear Mind becomes a dramatic help in the lategame as well. Level 30 is where you start seeing minions who stun (Crey riot cops, at least) and the amount of knockback, stun, sleep, disorient, hold just keeps going up. You don't need CM on _everyone_ because tank and scrapper mez protection is pretty good. My typical scrapper or tank gets held about four times (not counting Carnies) between getting my mez protection and hitting level 50.

One last bit of "canned advice"- there's a number of ways to build teams, some of which are imported from other games ("tank takes point, clumps badguys, everyone else fires AOE's on the clump") and some of which are fairly unique to this game ("row of force fielded blasters walks forward annihilating everything", or "eight Fire/Rad controllers clear everything with blinding speed in perfect safety", or whatever.) If you want to plan around the tank taking aggro, you can do that; but not everyone does that, nor are they "wrong" for playing differently.

You might be able to "Buy the merits" by asking in this forum if anyone is willing to build you one in a level range for a specified price. I don't know what it would cost; I got mine for about 75 million each but that was before the latest round of price inflation. (thanks to MadamePistachio and RagmanX for selling me stuff I need... and I may be forgetting someone. My inbox got munched in the board swap. Thank you to the Unknown Benefactor!)

The market's been pretty hollowed out in general since merits were introduced, and the AE system has made it more dramatically so.

At one point I accidentally did an experiment (it was supposed to be "made some profit..." ) and it looks like there's about as much activity at level 50 of a "Rare recipe" as there is in levels 30-49 combined.