Fulmens

Appendix 1: Shopping.

There's a lot of overlap with the market self-defense guide at post 16 in this very thread.

If you read nothing else, read this: You can leave a bid up overnight and collect it the next time you log on. That will save you millions.

Also, something that saves ME a lot of time is the idea of "too small to worry about." Worrying about 5000 inf on a 20 million inf build is like worrying about $5.00 on a $20,000 car. I don't personally bid less than 5000 inf for anything, because I know that what kills the budget is the million -inf items.

STEP ZERO: Gather thy ingredients. You're going to need "About five" of every common midrange salvage. That's sixty total, and you can only hold around thirty , plus thirty in your vault. You don't want to get crammed up with stuff you don't need. Some of them have thousands for sale and almost no bidders- the poster child for this is Improvised Cybernetics- while others have thousands of bids and maybe thousands for sale. Alchemical Silver typifies this one. Then there are the ones in the middle: things like Circuit Boards where there could be 500 for sale, or there could be like twenty.

Only stock up on the expensive ones (Alch Silver goes for between 50 and 100K) and the medium ones (Circuit Boards vary between 5K and 50K.)

STEP ONE: Pick two powers to change. Hopefully you either have a second build to use for this, or you have a lot of storage space in your SG. Anyway, pick two different types of powers (resistance and melee, or a hold and a ranged attack) and figure out what you need. Sometimes you can substitute something else- a Touch of Death Acc/Dam might be cheap and available, instead of the Focused Smite I always use. Make sure that the field in the upper right that normally says "For sale and bidding" is changed to "All." This lets you bid on stuff that nobody is selling OR buying right now. Then you get to be the first in line if someone wants to dump it cheap.

Plan your price point- you may WANT to buy it for 25K but be willing to go up to 50K. Try buying all the ones for sale between your chosen levels (I like 32 to 38 as I mentioned) at your chosen price. Then for your max price. If you don't buy any of those, leave bids on two or three levels AT YOUR CHOSEN PRICE. Figure out what salvage you still need to buy (probably the uncommons) and put in reasonable-to-low bids.

At this point it's a balance between impatience and greed, really. You've probably, out of eight or ten slots you're working on filling, you've probably got about four recipes that you bought on the spot. You need about six pieces of salvage for those, and a few more for the other recipes. Put in your bids and go do a radio mission, or do the dishes, or walk the dog or something. There are four periods of time in the market:

1) RIGHT NOW.
2) In the next 5-10 minutes.
3) Overnight.
4) Over the next seven days.

An amazing amount of cheap salvage moves in group 2. A lot of cheap recipes move in group 3. Most of the rest moves in group 4.

So you let the market work, just like when you put stuff up for sale and walk away. You get most of it, and you come back and some of it still hasn't been bought for your price. You maybe spend more for the last two things you need. No big deal, that's kind of normal.

STEP TWO: Pick two more powers. Start buying the stuff for them.

And so it goes.

Remember:

1) Cheap salvage comes along in the next ten minutes.
2) Bid on three or four levels of any recipe. Worst case, you get extras, craft em and sell em for a profit.
3) It's nearly always cheaper to buy the ingredients and craft. A lot cheaper. Millions cheaper. You can SOMETIMES get cheap crafted generic IO's, and SOMETIMES get cheap "unpopular" IO's (fear, snipes, stuff like that.)

Have fun! And remember: You can outfit an entire character for less than the cost of one Decimation: Dam/Rech IO. You don't have to grind for loot.

So for starters, you need to know what your goals are , what your budget is, and what you're trying to do.

I picked a Claws/Dark Armor scrapper at level 34 for a number of reasons:
* It has Resistance, Healing, Defense, Melee, Ranged and AOE attacks. It shows off a lot of different types of Frankenslotting.
* At level 34, you don't have remotely enough slots for everything you want to do in this build.
* Dark Armor is a huge end drain. Tremendous. This takes a lot of pressure off by letting you slot, for instance, Death Shroud for "1 acc, 3 damage, 3 endurance" or very close to it- and it does it in 5 slots.
* Level 34 is about halfway through the level-up process and slightly above where I usually do my serious Frankenslotting. If you Frankenslot around now, you can enjoy it for half the life of your character.

DISCLAIMER 1: I made some choices to show off the Frankenslotting that I wouldn't have made normally. This isn't built with an attack chain. There are things I would have slotted differently (Slash instead of Cloak of Darkness, for instance) in actual play. Do not play this literal build.

DISCLAIMER 2: I'm not using Mids' because I want to comment on each power. I've probably made some mistakes.

DISCLAIMER 3: I assume 50K for the recipe, 50K for the salvage, and around 50K for the crafting cost unless there's something expensive in there, in which case I'll mention it. Appendix 1 covers shopping techniques.

OVERVIEW: We're going with Flight for no real reason - you could just as easily throw in Jumping or Teleport (for the Nightcrawler effect) or Superspeed. Our goals are this:

-- One "global acc bonus" . As mentioned, this allows us to go a little light on Accuracy and still hit regularly. Follow Up, in the specific case, solves this... but Follow Up is not available to everyone. I did it for you!

-- 20%+ endurance reduction in nearly every attack. The rough rule of thumb is "one SO of End Reduction in one attack pays for one toggle." This isn't one SO of End Reduction, but it's a start.
-- Slash and Tough are not slotted for anything yet. I just didn't have the slots to show off EVERYTHING and those are very similar to other powers we demonstrated.
-- Dark Armor needs Knockback resistance. Instead of going with Acrobatics, we're going with a Steadfast -KB, which is one of the expensive [but very, very worth it] things in the build.
--My goal is to spend around 20 million on this build. For some powers I will put a "$$" with an option that costs a lot more but will give you some slight improvements.
-- In this build, I usually use level 34 or 36 IO's. you can go with just about anything in the 32-38 range and get essentially the same results. Buy what's cheap.

-- EXPENSIVE THINGS: Steadfast -KB in Dark Embrace (2.5 million); Scirocco's Dam/End in Death Shroud (approx 1.5 million); five Thunderstrikes (about 1.5 million); one Positron Dam/Rech (approx 2 million); one Air Burst Dam/Rech (approx 1 million.) Everything else is about 8 million, estimated, for a total cost of around 16.5 million. These prices may be different when you go shopping. The market is like that.

Name: Exemplia Gratia
Power sets: Claws/Dark Scrapper
Pools: Fitness, Flight, Fighting


LEVEL 1: Dark Embrace. 5 slots. Steadfast Protection: KB protection, Reactive Armor:Res/End [level 34], Titanium Coating: Res/End (level 36), Generic: Resistance (level 35), Impervious Skin: Res/End (level 29) . This gets you about 67% End Reduction and capped (54%-ish) Resistance.
Alternate: Replace Generic Resistance and Impervious Skin Res/End with Titanium Coating: Resistance and Titanium Coating: Res/End/Rech .Gives 1.5% more HP (set bonus), trivially less End Reduction and Resistance, and may cost more.
$$: Replace Generic: Res and Impervious Skin: Res/End with Impervium Armor: Res and Res/End . Increases End Recovery but costs a LOT more (a bare minimum of 5 million more at today's prices.)

REASONING: There's not a lot to improve on a Resist [or Defense] power. In this case we're putting the Knockback resistance in. Other than that, you want Resistance, you want End Reduction. And maybe you want set bonuses, although there's nothing spectacular here. Note the level 29 Impervious Skin: level 30 is max for the set, and that costs twice as much to craft [and often a LOT more to buy, although not in this case at this time.]

LEVEL 1: Strike. 4 slots. Focused Smite Acc/Dam (L34), Smashing Haymaker Acc/Dam (L34), Focused Smite Dam/End (L34), Generic Damage (L35).

REASONING: This gives capped damage (95.5%-ish), around 46% Acc (a bit more than a +3 SO) and around 23% End Reduction. This power is fast to recharge, so I didn't put any +Rech in there. Note that you have more than an SO of accuracy, half an SO of endurance, and three SO's of damage in your 4-slotted power.

Level 2: Slash. 1 slot.
REASONING: Limited slots. If I spent the slots, it would be Focused Smite Acc/Dam/Rech, Focused Smite Dam/End, Smashing Haymaker Dam/End/Rech, Smashing Haymaker Acc/Dam, Smashing Haymaker Dam/Rech for capped Dam, around 40% Acc, around 60% Rech and around 60% End Reduction in five slots. The recharge would be fairly well matched to Strike.

Level 4: Death Shroud. 5 slots. Multistrike Acc/Dam/End (L36), Multistrike Acc/Dam (L36), Multistrike Dam/End (L36), Cleaving Blow Dam/End (L36), Scirocco's Dervish Dam/End (L32).
REASONING: This should give around 40% accuracy, capped damage, 85% end reduction. The Scirocco's is very expensive (with careful shopping, most of that expense is the Military Cybernetic) but you need as much end reduction in Death Shroud as you can manage. Death Shroud is like having an AOE attack on auto, only it runs at the same time as all your other actual attacks. The end drain is colossal. With this slotting, it's merely painful.

Level 6: Boxing. 3 slots. Focused Smite Acc/Dam (L37), Smashing Haymaker Acc/Dam (L34), Generic Damage (35).

REASONING: 46% accuracy, about 83% damage. You never WANT to 3-slot an attack unless you have Hamidon Enhancements in there, but sometimes you have to. This is an example of doing the best you can in very limited space. Damage is not capped, and that makes me itch all over.

Level 8: Follow Up. 5 slots. Focused Smite Acc/Dam/Rech (L36), Focused Smite Acc/Dam, Focused Smite Dam/Rech (L36), Smashing Haymaker Acc/Dam (L34), Smashing Haymaker Dam/End/Rech (L34).

REASONING: About 64% Acc, 58% Rech, 18% End and capped Dam. Follow Up is a weird attack-it's almost more like Build Up than it is like an attack. It is crucial that it hit. So we slot for extra Accuracy, then "enough" Recharge (around 50% so it comfortably overlaps the 10 second duration of the buff), and then we fit in whatever damage and end red we can manage. This is one of the only times I will recommend skimping on damage "if necessary." Due to the magic of frankenslotting, it turns out not to be necessary.

Level 10: Obsidian Shield. 1 slot, level 35 generic End Reduction.

Level 12: Swift, 1 slot, level 35 generic Runspeed.

Level 14: Health, 1 slot, generic Heal .

REASONING: We don't need to slot these things much at this level. Ob. Shield is mez protection [very important] and psi resistance [almost never important, especially below level 40.] Health - two more slots is the difference between +56% Regen (0 to full in 153 seconds) and +80% Regen (0 to full in 133 seconds.) And at level 16 you get the Biggest Damn Heal In The Game.

Level 16: Dark Regeneration. 5 slots. Generic Acc (L35), four Harmonized Healing (Endurance, End/Rech, End/Heal, End/Heal/Rech) .
$$: Touch of the Nictus: Acc/End/Heal (L36), Touch of the Nictus: Acc/End/Rech (L36), Touch of the Nictus: Heal/Rech (L35), 2x Generic End Reduction (L35).

REASONING: about 36% Acc, 40% Heal, 40% Recharge, 95% End Reduction. This is another weird power. Your primary concern is Endurance Reduction: one Dark Regeneration = 34 Endurance = 3 Shockwaves. It heals about 1/3 of your HP bar per guy you hit, so in big groups you don't need Healing or Accuracy at all, really. I put in enough Acc and Heal that you _should_ get about half your HP back in melee distance of a single AV, and a little bit of Recharge because hope springs eternal. You never know, you MIGHT need it again and have the endurance to use it. The expensive version gives almost exactly the same numbers for the power itself, and a global Accuracy Bonus and a HP bonus, both of which are nice things to have.

Level 18: Focus. 5 slots. Five Thunderstrikes at level 36 or so (Acc/Dam/Rech, Acc/Dam/End, Dam/End/Rech, Dam/End, Dam/Rech) .

REASONING: 37% Acc, 95% Dam, 60% End Reduction, 60% Rech Reduction. Thunderstrike gives us the global ACC bonus we need to get from somewhere, as well as a nice End Recovery bonus. Focus is one of the crowning glories of Claws, so it's good to have a lot of everything. Shopping is crucial here because Thunderstrikes frequently vary between 100-200K and a 1+ million inf. If you're having budget troubles you can do a swap of ONE thunderstrike (losing only a travel speed bonus) as follows:

Acc/Dam/Rech: Replace with Ruin
*or*
Dam/End/Rech: Replace with Maelstrom's Fury
*or*
Dam/End or Dam/Rech: Replace with whatever's cheap.

Level 20: Stamina. 3 slots. Generic L30-35 EndMods.

L22: Hover. 1 slot. Flightspeed.

L24: Flight. 1 slot. Flightspeed.

L26: Murky Cloud. 4 slots. Except for the Steadfast, you can use the same slotting as Dark Embrace. I recommend the three Titanium Coatings and the Reactive Armor.

L28: Tough. 1 slot. When you slot this, use the same as Dark Embrace/Murky Cloud. I'd slot one Dam/End for now and only run it if I really had to.

L30: Cloak of Darkness. 4 slots. Red Fortune Def/End, Serendipity Def/End, level 29 or 30 Kismet Def/End, and a generic Defense IO. When you can get a fifth or sixth slot in here, Red Fortune has very good 4/5/6 set bonuses at reasonable prices.

L32: Shockwave. 5 slots. Detonation Acc/Dam, Air Burst Acc/Dam, Detonation Dam/Rech, Air Burst Dam/Rech, Positron Dam/Rech .

$$: Replace one Acc/Dam with a Positron Acc/Dam.

This is another power that you're probably going to want to use all the time, although I don't have any personal experience with it. The Positron Dam/Rech is going to be expensive and there's no way around it. The Air Burst Dam/Rech is also surprisingly expensive (it uses an Impervium.) With aggressive shopping you may be able to find a nearly-affordable Positron Acc/Dam; this gives a significant End Recovery bonus.

RESULTS: Compared to SO's or generic IO's, you use a lot less endurance, hit more often, have more accuracy and hit just as hard. Go forth and rip the place up.

Frankenslotting is the process of slotting a lot of different sets in the same power to build a monster out of spare parts. The classic cookbook on this is Cap'n Canadian's. However, that's really designed more for "replacing SO slots with something that performs roughly the same way." I figured I'd start something from the ground up to show how I think and what you can acheive.

The reason for Frankenslotting is that Set IO's have two benefits: the Set Bonuses and the actual high bonuses given by the powers themselves. The set bonuses are what people mostly think of when they slot a set: slot a Positron's Blast Acc/Dam and a Positron's Dam/Rech in the same power, get a 2.5% End Recovery bonus (equivalent to 10% more bonus in Stamina.) However, Set IO's also work like miniature Hami-O's. A level 45 Generic Accuracy IO [to pick a nice neat example] gives just about a 40% Acc Bonus. A Level 45 Generic Damage IO gives the same 40% Damage Bonus. But two level 45 Acc/Damage IO's (say a Devastation and a Thunderstrike) will give 50% Accuracy and 50% Damage. Two level 45 Acc/Dam/Rech IO's will give 40% Acc, 40% Dam and 40% Recharge in two slots.

Now a Devastation Acc/Dam/Rech recipe sells for something like 20 million influence. A Ruin Acc/Dam/Rech, on the other hand, sells for more like 0.2 million influence. If you don't care about set bonuses, you can get the Ruin for a tiny fraction of the cost.

You can get a lot more from slotting for set bonuses than you can from ignoring them: the equivalent of an extra SO of Accuracy in every power, one or two SO's of Recharge in every power, extra endurance and regeneration and whatnot- but you will end up spending a tremendous amount of money, and you may not finish your dream build until long after you hit level 50.

Frankenslotting is something you can do at any level (I tend to do it around level 32), for cheap, and it makes you something like 50% more effective than slotting SO's. 50% more damage per second, 50% more damage per endurance... frankenslotting can solve almost any problem your build has.

There are some set bonuses that you get in a Frankenslotted build- by accident, usually, or because it's no more expensive than avoiding them. The only set bonuses I deliberately aim for are these:

1) Accuracy. For every character I frankenslot, I usually pay for one or two sets that give Acc bonuses (in the 4th slot, generally) . This means that I can slot "one SO of accuracy, or a little more" and still hit nearly everything I aim at in the PVE game.
2) Knockback protection. If you don't have KB protection in your build, you should fix that. Acrobatics provides very good KB protection, but it also commits you to Superjump and takes up an entire power. Steadfast Protection and Karma have individual IO's that provide mag 4 KB protection, which basically means that almost nothing knocks you back in normal play.
3) Low hanging fruit. If it's cheap, or easy, I will get a few HP bonuses (usually 3-of-a kind) and Recharge or Regen bonuses (usually 2-of-a kind.) Those are slightly useful and very easy. I also will end up with a lot of worthless spam, like "1.65% confuse resistance" or "1% debt protection". Those are accidents.

In general, Frankenslotting is less like baking and more like making a casserole. If you dump in 5% more onions or 3% less butter, nobody cares. Likewise, if you get 5% more damage [over the softcap] or 3% less End Reduction, nobody cares. For this reason, it doesn't matter so much which specific IO recipes you use, or what level. I build with the idea that "31 to 37 should be fine."

You do need to know what weaknesses you're trying to fix- are you more concerned with tightening up your attack chain? Do you keep running out of endurance? Unexpected horrible death syndrome? and then you can work from there.

Next post: the specifics.

I'd pick Ice/something (probably ice/energy or ice/elec, for the big melee hitters) to answer the OP's question.

Then I'd go on for a while about my high-speed, nervewracking, l33t playstyle where I blow everything up real good on my fire/elec and they barely shoot back.

Then the OP would roll their eyes, and we'd both leave feeling superior to the other.

... oh sh**, I think I just had a moment of self-awareness.

Last time I heard "We need [x]" it was Brickstown, "We need a healer" and I was playin a Dark/Ice defender.

I actually got into an argument with the leader ... I don't remember whether I quit or got kicked, but it was probably just a matter of 20 seconds either way.

Phil said

Glad to help my friends and neighbors, as always... sending the PM now.

Edit: I'm trying to popularize the tags "currency exchange" and "inf transfer" .

Doubleposting to the OP: You're in the club if you think you're in the club. I never posted, directly, a screenshot of myself with a billion inf showing.

... oh, wait, I lied.

... added to which, people buying 40-50 commons to use on their own characters are almost guaranteed to have large reserves of inf. If you go up a level, get three slots, need 10 salvage and you made 5 million inf that level: you can pay 100K per item of salvage and still have 4 million left over for recipes. Or for next level, if prices go REALLY high.

I too am a newbie. I too have questions.

My wife and I wrote an arc. ("Big Ideas", by @Amazing Amazon . Villainry in the 20's. ) A 7-person team on Heroic went through our arc on heroic, and in mission #2 our custom boss showed up as a lieutenant.

Is this a known problem? If so, is there a known workaround?

the timing on my Dark/Traps is something like "Time bomb, trip mine, poison gas thingy, snipe, trip mine, boom" but it hardly ever works out in practice. I am also rusty on it.

I find my Dark/Traps to be low-damage but oddly satisfying to solo.

In any practical situation I wouldn't actually spend eight interruptible seconds setting it up unless, like, someone was summoning their undead hordes or something.

I'm a "Why would you need stamina AND quick regeneration?" kinda player. But I play Dark Armor, which eats your endurance bar and laughs at you from about level 12 to 50, so my idea of endurance management is different from most other peoples'.

Regeneration has MORE endurance recovery than most other people and LESS toggles to burn it. Stamina is just for people who can't be bothered to turn off Sprint in combat.

I'm going to clarify something that may not need clarifying.

There are actually two "systems" of enhancements. For the first few years there were training, dual and single origin enhancements and that was basically it. Then they added the invention system. Invention system gives you a bit more benefit at tremendous added complexity.

My advice is always "First time around, just use the enhancements from the stores. Sell your salvage for 1 influence at Wentworth's, sell any recipe with a "name" [like Positron's Blast] for 1 influence at wentworth's, sell any generic recipe to a store. If something doesn't sell after a day at Wentworth's, take it down and sell it to a store."

This is sort-of bad advice, because you may give people some serious bargains. You may sell something for half a million that's worth ten million to anyone else.

BUT if you're only using single-origin enhancements, you don't need ten million inf for anything, ever. You can buy a full set of the highest level SO's for about five million inf, and you have 47 levels to get that kind of money. You'll always have more money than you need.

Infinity, Victory and Pinnacle. Most of my Infinity slots are filled with SG-only characters, so I actually do more casual play on Victory these days. Pinnacle is mostly full of villains.

Every once in a while I'll wander over to Freedom or Virtue for one thing or another.

There are a lot of different approaches to enhancements. The simplest is probably "slot level 25 generic IOs at 22, leave them forever, get to 50, play with sets." The most complex involves different sets of IO's at 17, 22, 32, and doing your "Final build" from 40 on.

I'm a big fan of "Frankenslotting"- that is, using lots of different set IO's, but not going for set bonuses. If you slot two Acc/Dam/Rech set IO's [from different sets], you get the equivalent of one Accuracy, one Damage and one Recharge in two slots. You can often get very, very cheap recipes if you don't care about set bonuses; things like Ruin and Focused Smite work quite well and are really cheap.

My method is probably overcomplex, but I like IO's. Generally I use DO's through level 22. At 22 I slot "mostly" SO's, but tend to use a pair of Accuracy/Damage IO's in each attack power. This gives me slightly better than SO performance and it never degrades with level.

At 27 I refresh my SO's.

Around 30-32 I start frankenslotting all my powers. This gives me results that are "Good enough to last until I get bored." In the low to mid 40's I start building for set bonuses- but mostly because I'm bored and rich, not because I need better performance.

The only exception on the "no set bonuses" guideline is that I like to get one or two global Acc bonuses, and if my character doesn't have knockback protection I'll put the money into getting it.

My usual advice for "Reluctant capitalists" is this: Next time you want to buy something, look at the price of the recipe (and salvage, and crafting cost) and then look at the price of the last 5 "Crafted" versions of that. Usually there's a million-plus difference in prices.

Then buy two, craft two, sell one and slot the other.

It won't necessarily pay for your expensive IO habit, but it will subsidize a lot of it.

EDIT: This won't solve the problem that you hate the market and think it is no fun. This WILL solve the problem that you have trouble affording the high-end gear you covet.

Lemme whip up a rough draft... maybe this should be on the Paragon Wiki so it can be a true group effort.

FIRST: If you learn to use the market, even a little, you will have more money. You will get what you want faster and more easily. I had to say it once, and I will bring it up no more.

SECOND: Single-Origin enhancements will cover most of your needs. The only really "important" IO's, in my opinion, are:

* some sort of knockback protection if you don't have it. This is game changing for me.
* some amount of global accuracy, so you can get away with one SO of accuracy
* A "movement Stealth" IO is very nice, on some characters.
* Many people vote for something like a Miracle +Recovery. I believe you can get away without one, because I played without 'em for years.

FACTS ABOUT SO'S:
- Below level 25, Mr. Yin's store in Faultline sells one type per origin.
- Level 35-40 requires you to do (or autocomplete) a mission before the store will sell to you. You can do this mission from level 30 on.
- Level 45-50 requires you to do a mission for Ghost Falcon in Peregrine.
- I think level 35-50 can also be bought [no mission needed] in the Rikti War Zone. You must be 35+ to get in, so level 32-35 are problematic.

GENERIC IO's: It is possible to craft an entire set of generic IO's and get through the 1-50 game that way, I suppose. You can get salvage cheaply with AE Tickets - generics only use commons- and save recipes that fall in Dev content. Or buy them from the table, worst case. [Market prices for generic recipes are almost always far below table prices. Oops, I did it again.]

GETTING WHAT YOU REALLY WANT:

Custom Merit Buys- for the cost of 10 rolls, you can get exactly what you want. Given that there's a pretty good chance that your dream build needs 10 different things from the "rare" table (what do they call Pool C these days?) , if you roll 10 times you'll probably get 2 or 3 of what you need. Do that a couple of times and then custom-buy the remainder.

Uncommons- I don't see a good way except hundreds and hundreds of bronze rolls. Learn to frankenslot.

Salvage- You can practically buy the exact common salvage you want: you're random rolling from a group of 6, so you don't have to roll a LOT to get that alchemical silver. And it's fine to have two or three extras of any given thing sitting around. Uncommons are exact-buys for tickets, and pretty cheap at the price. Or you can save your uncommons from non-AE play.

I don't know if the "Dev Digest" tags are accurate, but if so they'd be useful until we have, y'know, a Dev Digest again.

I've done a couple of these types of posts, selling things that don't show up very often [and thus are not likely to be searched for casually.] I'm under the impression that it helps me sell faster, for more money, but I haven't really tried an experiment with a control group.