Fulmens

Sell it fast, my friend. Double-XP crazy prices often end after two weeks.

My experience with Storm is very limited [I followed a friend around while trying to figure out what did and didn't work in the set] but I remember being startled to notice that Lightning Storm tended to knock people out of its own AOE. I've always used Dark Blast for the two overlapping cones- tentacles to keep 'em in place for the other one, and I don't use Torrent.

... I guess what I'm saying is that I'm fussy about positioning, so Storm isn't the set for me.

You may be about to learn the horrible truth that I learned: You spend two hours writing up an eloquent, well-researched post and people take five seconds respond with "Nu-uh!"

Be that as it may, it's an eloquent, well-researched post.

Minor points:

* Fulcrum Shift applies its results once per enemy within some radius of you. So it's not "50% +40%", it's something like "50% + 40%*X" (170% for three guys in range.)

* If a Blaster has access to Fireball, they also have access to Fire Breath.

* Controllers get Fireball in the epics.

* I'm not quite sure I follow your DPS calculations. This may be a problem on the reader side, not the writer side.

I've got a Rad/Psi that's quite nice. Rad has some of everything, so it turns out that it has some -Recharge. Psi has a lot of -Recharge as well, in attacks you'd use ANYWAY, so you have the ability to prevent enemies from shooting back... well, not "Ever" but you can put them at the recharge floor. Not just "even-cons are at the recharge floor", but even +3s are only shooting back when you feel like letting them.

That's on top of the -damage, massive -ToHit, and every other painful thing Rad does to enemies.

Rad/Psi is somewhat more defensive than Rad/Sonic, I think. Not better or worse, just more defensive.

EDIT: You may think Psi sucks against robots. And it does. . . but the electromagnetic pulse doesn't.

Fastest team I've personally played on regularly was one of the Viva Las Vegas teams... probably Noise Complaint, which doesn't quite meet the standards of this challenge. We had four sets of Sonic Blasts (three blasters, one defender) and five Assaults. No rad, no kin, and we could still drop archvillains in well under a minute. Probably fairly wussy by TopDoc standards, but insanely fast by mine.

My dream team starts with five blasters and a force field defender. Add an Emp/sonic, add someone to play forward observer (fire/fire tank would work well.)

I suppose you could run it with two blasters, two defenders, two corruptors, one tank, and that friend of yours who always has to play something different from what they said they were going to play. As many as you can manage run Assault, some of them run Tactics and Maneuvers (see: play something different) and you run around like maniacs.

Personally I feel that there are two limiting factors on a steamroller team. You might think "Time to drop the easy targets and time to drop the tough targets", but actually it's "Time to toggle stuff up and time to knock it down." By emphasizing the Sonic Blasts, you don't really need to toggle stuff up. With four or so sets of sonics going, by the third shot you've accumulated well over 100% resist debuff and there is nothing left but the tough targets, who are mysteriously not tough any more.

Thing about the inf destruction party is... over the course of it, my net worth was actually going UP.

That last burn was a really big one, though.

Give it to me. To hold.
*nod*

My [very rough] math says that if you farm for an hour you introduce, over and above what you consume in market fees and crafting and such, about 500K into the system. To burn that 500K completely means spending it ten times; people have to spend 5 million inf to bring the system back to where it was. The extreme example is someone who put almost 40 million into the system in an hour of play, which requires 400 million inf of spending to get rid of it.

With numbers like that, who needs to blame RMT?

Lohenien- even the AE is not pure new money. Because even there, you're generating the max tickets, which will get turned into SOMETHING that gets sold on Wents.

Taking your 8-character AE run- I have no data points so I'm using your numbers - you'd generate "max" tickets. I think that's 1500 per run; someone please correct that number, because if it's right that's a fluke.

If we turn those tickets into rare salvage, making the huge simplification that "everything costs about the same, so there's a constant ticket-to-inf ratio" and we turn that rare salvage into inf at one salvage to 1 million inf (another simplification), we get 540 tickets: 1 million inf, or about 3 million inf per run per person. This burns 300,000 inf per run per person. 600K per person per hour, or 4.8 million for the team. So that 24 million of "new inf" is actually only 19 million; if you get a better deal for your tickets, it's considerably less. And if you do the boss run you burn about 2.4 million inf and make about 32 million.

So 80-90% "new money" instead of 20%. . . subject to better data, of course. (I think 540 merits of bronze rolls sells for probably a lot more than a million inf. )

I don't know if this is worth reading- it's me thinking as I go. It started with the idea that every inf generated by a farmer [or anyone else who plays the game] needs to be spent ten times in the market before it disappears in fees. So farming up 100 million actually generated a billion inf in sales. However, this is not true because farmers don't just generate cash. They generate recipes, salvage, and things that get sold at Wentworth's. So they're bringing inf into the system but they're also generating fees which remove inf from the system. Their profit is not 100% new money. Note the difference between "revenue" (the personal net worth of the player) and "generated money" (the increase in the amount of total money in the game.)

Here's a rough analysis - someone out there has probably done a better one, which I'd love to see. It's full of guesses and oversimplifications and rhetorical devices.

TopDoc's income from farming was something like "1/3 of money from inf and common recipes, 1/3 rare recipes/salvage, and 1/3 purple recipes." I don't remember the exact numbers, which would throw everything off of course, but if those are correct:

Let's take the case of 3 million inf per hour. 1 million inf comes from cash, or things that are profitable to sell to vendors [I can only think of generic recipes; anything else? ]This is the only inf that enters the game.

1 million inf comes from rare recipes and salvage, sold at Wentworth's. So 100K leaves the game that way.

1 million inf comes from purple drops, sold at Wentworth's. So 100K more leaves the game THAT way.

So out of 3 million inf that goes in the pocket of the farmer, 800K enters the game as "new money".

If we assume that 50% of items on the market are flipped for double the money, that's 1 million inf bought, and sold for 2 million. That's an additional 200K removed. 600K of new money.

If an average purple [this includes all the sleeps and so forth] is 50 million, as a guess, and takes 3 million of salvage, that's 53 million. Crafting cost is 600K, or very roughly 1% of purchase cost. So 10K removed.

If the average "worth keeping" recipe costs 10 million and is crafted for around 200K, that's 2% of the recipes. But the 1 million of "rare recipes and salvage" isn't all recipes. So maybe 1%. So another 10K removed.

So for every 3 million inf profit by farmers, somewhere around 500-600K is new money, still in the system after the farming is done.

If we double my assumption for "Average price of a purple":
the farmer gets 4 million in revenue.
The 100K in purple sales becomes 200K.
The 100K of "50% flip" becomes 150K.
The leftover inf goes from around 550K to around 400K .

We still have a whole lot of new money being generated by actual play. I was hoping that I could remove the inf that the farmer spent on goodies (4 million, spent at Wentworth's, is 400K and we come out almost even,) but I've already accounted for that; some OTHER player produced that, in their own hour of play, and what the farmer buys some other farmer sells.

Any ideas about this? Anything major I'm missing? Is this all just pointless?

I'm talking about most of the Controller population being three combos out of 56; you're talking about most of the Defender population being 30 combos out of 72.

You do see there's a difference there?

Anecdotally, I grabbed the first six people who wanted to come along on a Manticore the other day and I got two controllers, both Fire/Kin. What are the odds?

Just gonna mention this... I never had a problem finding teammates on my FF/* characters. Just send a tell to a Blaster or three saying something pithy. I like "/t $target, Join my team and you may never get hit again. Level 26 FF/energy (or whatever) defender LF blasters."

Works best in the late 30's/early 40s.

Edited to point out that you have to be OK with the following math:

If it takes you 200 hours to level 50 [actual play is around this, I think] and you rebubble every 3 minutes on average, that's 4000 "rebubble cycles" to level 50. I do it like this: shift-1, 6,7, shift-2, 6,7, shift-3, 6,7, shift-4, 6,7, oops I'm #5, shift-6, 6,7, shift-7, 6,7, shift-8, 6,7 .

I've got over a thousand hours on force fielders, and I don't even notice any more. It's like "Time to rebubble!" [45 second fugue]

There are about four "specific combos" for Controllers that make the rep. Fire/Kin, Fire/Rad, Ill/Rad... I'm not sure what the other one would be, but if a glitch took those three combos off every server you'd see three times as many Defenders as Controllers, instead of the other way around.

"Specific build" matters. (see Firetankapalooza, or the Fire/Dev Summer of 2004.)

I keep thinking I should change my sig back to "What this team needs is more blasters".

... you know that traditionally the angel is on the right shoulder?

Fox hunting is properly aristocratic. Why shouldn't any other "pursuit of the inedible by the unspeakable" be equally blue-blooded?

Does the "join date" on your forum account match the "join date" on your game account?

In other words, have you actually been playing less than a month?

The "Gotta get to 50" bug is something I vaguely remember. When it hit my wife and I, we hooked up with Ego's Shadow, and played two hours a night, on big 8-person teams set on invincible, for a month. We beat every Praetorian there was, two or three times over. It got to the point that we'd start the team and people were banging on the door to get in, even though our slogan was "Everybody fights. Everybody dies."

Of course that was 2004 and it took 500 hours to hit level fifty. 300 if you were crazy fast.

So yeah, if you get determined and build a core of regular players, you will get to 50 before you know it. You just need to put people who play well, and fast, on your friends list and start teams every night.

You could get PL'd to 50, that's the other choice, but that's really really lame.

Everybody fights. Everybody dies. You with us?

I've got six or so level 50 Blasters, two level 50 Scrappers, two level 50 FF defenders, one level 50 Rad defender, and one level 50 Tank. Also one level 50 Corr and one level 50 Brute, with a Stalker coming up fast.

But hey, if you want to believe you're the only person with alts... go ahead.

I was just trying to point out that kheldians don't get any bonuses for the teammates they didn't bring, nor does Gauntlet do anything for a solo tank. I could be wrong; feel free to clarify how.

I have a bind on my Rads for AM that says "Gather for Defender's Ego." If you think you're the only person on the team that the team needs... you're two steps from being the passive aggressive prima donna Empath that nobody actually wants.

You know, the one who gets a "Thank you" when they rez someone and doesn't stop to think "I screwed up, and that's why I have to rez you in the first place."

My Force Field Defenders are my go-to on bad situations, true, but I'm not the last minute savior of the team. I don't HAVE a heal, I don't have any "emergency fix" powers... I actually like it when people go "This was a really good team!" and can't figure out why.

People who play Defenders for the applause are likely to tweak the situation if they feel they're not getting the applause they deserve. Which is as much as any other member of the team who DOES THEIR JOB. (Why yes, I am thinking of an Empath that started to "Forget" to give Fortitude to my Ice Tank, resulting in me taking three times the damage. Why do you ask?)

ElectricEmu said

Elec on a Brute didn't get spectacular for me till about level 33.