Fulmens

35-39 rolls will get you sets that cap at 35. I don't know if that's better odds than the 20-24. 35-39 gold does include the LoTG Recharge, the Miracle unique and the Numina unique, if that changes anything for you. But rolling 30-34 is about the worst of all possible worlds if you're trying for specifics. You get everything that caps at 30 AND everything that starts at 30.

I believe Bronze rolls are "uncommon pool A with 1/8 of a rare pool A".
Silver rolls, I think, are some combo of pool B with rare pool As, I don't know the odds.
Gold rolls are "rare" (was pool C and pool D, which are now combined into one pool.)

And then we start getting into quotes like "The stock market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" and "The stock market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term" and "in the long term we are all dead" and whatnot.

Much like the "ttp" rule (Not Safe For Work) ... the amount of time between introducing a new feature and that feature getting misused for powerlevelling is pretty darn small.

My general advice is to play through the world as it stands once or twice (depending on if you like to read the stories- otherwise one warehouse full of badguys is much like another) before going into the Architect building.

90% of the stuff in the AE building is not designed to tell a story, and 80% of the remainder tells a story badly. But that remaining 2% is,like, a couple thousand pretty good stories.

Note that there is a difference between the "set bonuses" and the intrinsic bonuses - the bonuses that go with the actual power. There may be a better word for those. Set bonuses go away 3 levels below the level of the power.

Let's say you have four level 45 Thunderstrikes slotted: one Acc/Dam/Rech, one Dam/End/Rech, one Acc/Dam/End and one Dam/Rech. At level 45 you get almost exactly 20% for each part of a triple and 25% for each part of a double.

So you'd have 40% Acc, 20% End, 85% Dam and 65% Recharge if I'm doing my math right (and my math is sometimes right.) You would also have set bonuses: something like 2% to endurance recovery, 2.5% to En/Neg defense, and 7% to accuracy.

As long as you stay above level 42 everything works perfectly.

At level 40, you're not losing any "enhancement" (Because you're over level 32)- you've still got the 40% accuracy and so forth- but you lose all your set bonuses. No extra recovery, no defense, no extra accuracy.

At level 20, you still have no set bonuses. But you ALSO have all your intrinsic bonuses multiplied by .553. So that 40% accuracy becomes (40*.553) or ... umm, 22.6% accuracy. That 85% Damage becomes 47% or so.

A lot worse than your level 45 damage, but it's supposed to make you play sort of like a real level 20 character.

If you have, say, three level 40 and one level 45 Thunderstrikes, you would lose the "slot 4" bonus (accuracy) exemping to level 41, and the "slot 2" and "Slot 3" bonuses (recovery and defense) at level 36.

There are a lot of exceptions and odd cases, but this covers most of what you'll see.

If you're an old coot who has a bunch of level 50's, like me, and you want to generate level 35 recipes you can freeze a popular-on-teams character (like a Force Field/Sonic) at 35 on Freedom and every couple weeks, run through something and get a bunch of merits.

Conserve power can wait.

In a very unpopular opinion, I'm going to suggest that Stamina can wait till 22; I'd rather have the firepower and take a lot of blues than have the endurance but not the tools.

I'd also suggest, if it's not too late, that you can get by into the 20's with the temporary travel powers from the safeguard missions you can do from 5-10 (flightpack) or 10-15 (jump pack).

I recommend the following as soon as they open up:
Fireball
Firebreath
Aim
Build Up
Blaze
and at least one of Energy Punch or Bone Smasher.

This gives you the "Burn down an entire group of minions" combo (breath/ball) and the tools to burn down higher-level groups of minions (Build up, Aim, or both).

... is this the time to mention that,on any of my 3 favorite blasters, probably 40% of my single-target damage is done at point blank range?

Right then, moving along.

I think the Damage Guide points out "Or you could team with a total idiot." My wife was commenting on her lack of that damage badge - on a fire brute, where she survives by healing herself and has been collecting the Ouro badges and doing all the Ouro missions- and I invited her to help me duo Positron as an AV. Got her 1% of the 10 million badge, right there right then.

I'm such a good husband.

24% Defense- so half the even con minions missed you, and an even con AV (except the ones with Accuracy, like Chimaera or Battle Maiden or whatever) missed you 40% of the time instead of 15%. Yeah, that's going to make a difference on Headsplitter.

... And something like 18% smash/lethal resistance.

I don't think you can say that the GDN was a universal nerf and leave it at that.

Consider the behaviour of Invuln and SR scrappers, for instance. In issue 4 Invuln had "75% S/L res, 66% E/N/F/C res, AND capped Def except against the last couple guys, and 60% more HP with an occasional huge heal" and SR had "Capped defense, maybe, if they weren't too much tougher than you." So Invuln was about 3 times as tough on resistance, 1.6 times as tough on HP... 4.8 times as tough, period.

Invuln lost a lot more than SR; I don't know if they had equal performance in issue 6, but it was a lot closer.

Likewise, Invuln scrappers got a lot closer to Blasters in defensive strength. Blasters lost... the ability to use AOE's on spawns far too large to survive. That was their main loss.

Note that the "average time" is sometimes far from "the time that an average player takes to do it." The most severe example is the Eden trial- an hour to ninety minutes of fast, brutal fun that was done by hundreds and hundreds of "speeden" teams in ten to fifteen minutes a shot. Something well over 80% of the datamined Eden trials were under fifteen minutes. I believe Eden is worth doing for its own sake- it's a wonderful trial- but don't do it for the reward.

It's very close after Freedom and Virtue- I've seen Victory in 3rd sometimes [morningish times] and others. No, I don't remember. Why am I posting? I'M TALKING AND I CAN'T SHUT UP.

You can convert into rare salvage at something like 20 brainstorms:1 rare salvage.

But yeah, you are kind of stuck with Betamax salvage.

Edit: on the plus side, it was free.

Nifty data that I missed in previous attempts to fiddle with data....

this changes my estimates on the economy significantly.

cool.

They just need to relax their sphincters. Or something.

I'm guessing you have an old-school budget, like "under 20 million inf."

Around post 23 in my mini-guides, I discuss Frankenslotting.

For the singletargets, try to get a set of five Thunderstrikes in one of them (any five, level 32-39 will be fine depending on what's cheap to buy.) That will get you some extra Endurance and global Accuracy. For the rest of the singletargets, try something like this- again, any level from 32 on up:

Thunderstrike Acc/Dam/Rech, Dam/End/Rech
Ruin Acc/Dam/Rech
Maelstrom's Fury Dam/End/Rech
Either a generic Dam (if you bought mostly low levels)or another Dam/Whatever That's the equivalent in SO's of Acc/Dam/Dam/Dam/Rech/Rech/End .

For melee attacks, I tend to slot them less because I tend to jump in, unleash a flurry of slaps, then jump out. Don't need much recharge for that trick. So two Acc/Dam, one Dam/End (or dam/rech) and one generic Damage should get you where you need to be in four slots. If you want more you can either frankenslot (two acc/dam, three dam/whatever) or you can go with, say, four Touch of Death or four Mako's and a "misc" for the extra Health and Damage.

For the snipe, you can generally buy crafted IO's incredibly cheaply and get a strong second-rank set (Executioner's Contract or Extreme Measures) for close to the cost of SO's. You may need to mix and match (4 of one set, 1 of another).

For Nova, I recommend four Damage/Recharge (obliteration, cleaving blow, multi-strike and Scirocco's) and one Acc/Dam. This will be a little expensive.

Personal Force Field: Three Recharge (you're capped on defense already), or if you have extra slots consider 4-6 Red Fortune. It's a good, cheap set.

Force of Nature: Slot for Resistance and Recharge. Resist/Recharge IO's are comparatively pretty cheap. Serendipity, Reactive Armor, whatever's cheap. Throw in up to four of those.

Temp Invuln: Resist/Endurance IO's, whatever's cheap. Probably three Res/End and one straight Resistance.

Two last things worth spending money on:

1) Knockback protection - a Karma IO in Hover. Costs millions and worth every inf.
2) Stealth IO in a movement power- you can put either Celerity +Stealth or Unbounded Leap +Stealth in a veteran sprint power and have stealth on demand. Not as vital as KB protection but helps with the Blaster "Shoot first, shoot last" playstyle.

Hope this helps!

BlackSly said

Back in the old days, Flares was about 2/3 the damage of Fire Blast and Fire Blast was a LOT faster- about half the activation time. Now Fire Blast is slower, Flares is faster, and they're very comparable attacks.

As far as IO's: I'm a big fan of frankenslotting (putting bits of this and that together to make a monster) but you don't HAVE to do it by any means.

My standard single-target ranged attack combo is this- you can slot it any time from level 30 on:
Thunderstrike - Acc/Dam/Rech, Dam/End/Rech
Maelstrom's Fury - Dam/End/Rech
Ruin- Acc/Dam/Rech
Generic Damage

This gives "one SO of accuracy, three SO's of damage, one SO of endurance reduction, two SO's of recharge" -seven "slots worth" in five slots. And I think you can still fill all five slots for under a million inf.

Obitus: I agree with most of your content but have somehow come to different conclusions.

My Blasters (admittedly most of my Blasters are fire/*) are much more delicate than my Scrappers, and seem to do much more damage.
It may be observer bias. Here are some other possible explanations:

It may be "area covered"- it's a lot easier to hit eight guys with Blaster firebreath than with,for instance, Scrapper fire breath.

It may come down to the "degree of overkill": on a Fire/en/elec, I often have to tab a couple times to find a target for my third AOE. I go to knife range in a hurry and generally by the time I get to my melee attacks it doesn't take many of them to drop the survivors. I certainly feel like I'm getting through a lot more enemies a lot faster on a Blaster. Blaze/havoc punch/charged brawl is a lot of pain in a hurry. [I realize I'm mixing blasters; I have fire/ice, fire/elec and fire/energy, as well as sonic/mental, en/fire and a couple of lowbies. ]

It may come down to liberal use of nukes; my personal record being around 20 Crey in 12 seconds (bu/aim/fireball/fire breath/ "oops, other spawn aggroed"/jump/Inferno) followed closely by 28 Praetorian Banished Pantheon in 32 seconds (using careful herding in order to determine whether Blizzard was disproportionately "overkilly". Sadly, the overkill doesn't turn out to be easily useful due to the aggro cap.)

It may come down to "time between fights"- Spine Burst doesn't help between fights, while that downtime doesn't hurt the "waiting for recharge" time on Fireball and Firebreath.


Basically my feeling is that the balance for Blasters is still "Do they dare use their full potential on a team?" And if they do, and they survive, they do a LOT of damage in a HUGE hurry. I got on a team where I had Speed Boost and Adrenaline Boost most of the time, once... I figured I'd just keep speeding up until I died, and I didn't die. I was throwing a Nova about every 75 seconds. Bless that Empath, and bless that Kin.

To clarify the good and the bad on Freedom: I have a theory that because the population is so high, people rarely team with the same people twice on Pickup Groups. This means that [if you're badly behaved] you tend to go longer without being checked, and [if someone on your team is badly behaved] you're more likely to put an SEP field on them then try to actually fix the problem. Freedom is therefore, I think, slower to turn ignorant, unsocialized players into knowlegeable, sociable players than other servers.

In other "You may want *this* server" suggestions: I believe there are a lot of people playing on Victory in European time zones.

Being wildly optimistic about my ability to interpret that, I'm going to guess "buy up most of the competing stock and list one big batch." May also have said "Flip" and meant "Craft and sell."

Does anyone know how to link to not just a post, but the thread from that post on? Because I think in my enthusiasm I posted a link to part 1 of about 3 parts.